The Google sandbox is like the Loch Ness Monster or Big Foot. Evidence is apparently seen but never proven or admitted by an authoritative body. Is the ’sandbox effect’ a flaw or delay in googles algorithm? Are we talking Ghosts in the Shell? Google migrated to a new data centre in 2003, and even before the dust has settled, SEO merchants noticed some weirdness? Suddenly dropping links everywhere on a site took 30 days to ’show up’(almost too precise)

The bottom line is - it doesn’t matter if a small business has been established for decades. If they have a new website on a new domain, then they are dead in Google for competitive keyword rankings, unless they do something extraordinary. Why can’t you escape? Your fighting for googles trust and they have heard websites cry wolf before.

Is it googles fault? Should we have them flogged? No, they are just a company and ‘we’ the surfing geeky net addicted let the Googleness Monster take over our searching world. We created this creature. Now it controls our interweb (or hypernet) Skynet?

So now we have the yette in charge of our google rankings how on earth do you shake the sandbox effect in the quickest possible way?

Building links and anchor text on your own site is fine but what you do need is links from trusted third party providers. You need links from a site you can produce user generated content. The age of Web 2.0 is FOOOOOL of them.

The cheap as chips, easy winners are:

1. Link on your ebay about me page.

2. Link on your myspace account.

3. Links on your live journal account

Sounding familiar? WhAAAT? You already have these all set up and you never just slipped in your website link? Well do so.

If you are a small business, you can look into business directories (which can be pricey) and also respond to blog posts that are topical to your website and you are usually asked to provide an email addy and website address.

I have been doing alot of research on business blogging of late and I recently read this interview with Anil Dash by e-consultancy and it lead me to this great summary article by inconcerta ‘Corporate Blogging on the Rise‘ As I suspected Anil Dash indicated that a blog was the most cost effective method for SME’s to maintain a relationship with their existing customers, potential customers ad employees. Quoting inconcerta…

1. Metrics: As the audiences for each blog are different it is difficult to apply a standard metric to measure success. You can’t compare number of hits if you only allow the 10 people in your team to read the internal blog.
2. SEO: To be found by search engines, the content must be compelling, well-presented, intelligently-linked and used by its audience. Avoid splogging by hosting with a good neighbourhood in the blogosphere.
3. Contribution Policy: Provide a communications policy for contributor employees to become the company’s public spokespeople so that they reflect the company positively and take responsibility for what is said.
4. Regularity of Contributions: Technorati defines a blog as “active” if it’s been updated in the last three months. Dash says the standards for activity range from 30 to 90 days but even this isn’t applied across the board. Some blogs have a finite life span; e.g. for the lifetime of an event and are not updated. Avoid having a policy about how often to update a blog as this ‘doesn’t take into account the nuances of human conversation’. Blogs need to be updated as appropriate for conversation. Set appropriate expectations and be guided by your audience.

In the interveiw Anil also talked about monitoring the content of such blogs as this medium is still part of the corporate image and also and ‘Exit Stratedgy’. When a blog’s usefulness has passed and it does happen as blogging might be a fad or here to stay, who knows! A final post explaining the end of the blog and why provides closure for your readers. A blog should never contain dead links. These need to be kept updated as your blog may still have effective information for customers.

In my view a news blog needs to be updated 2 to 3 times a day but a business blog 3-4 times a week. Don’t let just one person write to this blog as it will become very stayed. A blog should be everything. A great source of information, a marketing tool and even a direct sales too. Make sure it is easy to contact you via this blog, and that your blog is linked to your main site domain, and not a freebie hosted on a random server. Unless you are a very small business like an independent shop, then you might not have the tools to host a large website etc.

Bah! Enough business blogging talk. I shall post about my hobbies next!
Technorati Profile

According to the BBC in the article ‘Online fashion sales ‘top £1bn‘ sales of fashion and shoes on-line are booming! It also says that New Look are looking to move some sales on-line. I would certainlysubscribe as I hate the queues in EVERY New Look store I have ever been too and half the time the tags are missing. The UK is Europe’s biggest on-line shopper so the fashion industry should boom on-line this year. I do hope so as so much is being pushed into advertising on ‘community sites’ such as Myspace. Advertisers are targeting the web ready 16-30 year olds who have fully subscribed to the new ‘Web 2.0′ social sites wave.

Bah. I have been shopping on-line since 1999…..and I wish I knew what I knew now as I would have hit this boom in a different way and started my blog then to get some years behind it. Even though it would have just been a plain website then. I am proud to say I managed to get web ready in May 2000, with a little site - oh how basic it was! Geoshitties to start with! I still have that geocities site….somewhere!

Just having a sneaky ready of one of my favourite blogs on ebay and the e-commerce world and found this article.

According to internet retailer magazine, Amazon had a nice 45% slice of the online sales at Christmas ( compared with 17.5% for eBay - see the January Issue 2 Volume 1 of Internet Retailer and we all know Books, DVDs and other media do well on Amazon. So these ebay fee changes for the UK technology categories is suspicious!

Reducing your fees ebay? What ARE you thinking? Oh? That your recent hike in fees has killed off your sellers and all the media sellers have swamped to Amazon? What about the rest of the categories? We don’t have any where else to go yet? but we will…..oh yes we will……

I agree with Scott Wingo on the fact that ebay has been blindly pushing away its sellers opening up the chance for other marketplces to dominate. This change is a positive one, but ONLY for one type of product? I hope this is an indication of things to come and ebay will fight to keep its sellers. I for one had to stop my ebay dealing as the traffic had gone and the fees had rose.

Reduce the fees on the fashion and shoes categories ebay! You know you want too!

So the rumour is that ‘anchor links’ are the best way to improve your SEO naturally. So whats one of those?

For example this is a text link:

My favourite Jiu Jitsu Site is here

An anchor link is:

This is my favourite Jiu Jitsu site.

The keyword jiu jitsu is used and this will all be stored in googlies database. So the questions is….are you just increasing someone elses traffic with this technique or your own? Its a bit of both!