Source: seologs.com

Like it or not, the most important ingredient of getting traffic to a website is incoming links from external websites. Unless you already own a network of hundreds of established sites, which is very unlikely, link building can be by far the most difficult part about promoting a website, but It doesn’t have to be. Below are some tips and examples of some easy ways to get lots of good permanent links.

Link Bait

The Definition of Link Bait”: Link Bait is any content on a website, that is especially interesting, controversial, or funny, that will catch people’s attention, and therefore be linked to from many other websites. Put simply, it is viral marketing for the web.

Examples of Link Bait

• The Million Dollar Homepage
  This site, created by student Alex Tew was a great example of link baiting. His idea to sell pixels on an ordinary website was so bold and outrageous, that it attracted mass amounts of attention and links from all over the web, and he raised over 1 million dollars in a few short months.
• The Redscowl Bluesingsky SEO Contest
  A much smaller example of link baiting that I did back in January of 2006. It was a simple SEO contest that drew some controversy because it was announced on the heels of a few other SEO contests. It was small, but very effective.

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Source: webmasterbrain.com

What is the sandbox?

The Google Sandbox Effect is defined as the situation where the results of Google’s main ranking algorithms (PageRank, TrustRank, HillTop, whatever is in place) are initially inhibited when applied to a new property due to one or more temporal algorithm procedures taking effect. Put simply, when it’s obvious your recently launched site deserves a decent rank based on typical factors, but instead it’s nowhere to be seen.

Does the sandbox really exist?

Google engineer Matt Cutts has essentially acknowledged that a sandbox effect exists and that it’s a product of their algorithm, and at least one other anonymous Google engineer is reported to referred to a "probation" period for new sites. Despite some differences in terminology, the sandbox as an abstraction for a specific sum of parts in Google’s larger algorithm is almost certainly existent.

Who does the sandbox affect?

Sites most affected by the sandbox effect usually appear to fit one or more of the following key criteria:

1. Newly established
2. Target a highly competitive and/or commercial industry
3. Have attempted optimization, especially link building

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Source: pandia.com

Google’s supplemental index is considered a valley of death by search engine marketing experts, and pages included in this index is rarely included in regular search results. So what do you do to avoid this trap?

According to Google’s FAQ page, supplemental results are part of Google’s auxiliary index (main results are drawn from the main index) and pages, which appear on the supplemental listing, have “fewer restrictions” than those that appear on the main results page.

They further say that the inclusion of sites on the main or supplemental index is purely automated and does not affect page rank at all.

Supplemental results are only included when the main index fails

In truth however, pages that appear on the main index will almost always show up first in a search. Supplemental search results will only show up if there are very few or no results at all in the main index.

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