Many marketers are reluctant to “share” their hard gained PageRank with other topic related websites, through outbound links. Excluding competitive reasons, their concerns are summed up in these two:

1. bleeding to much PR that there isn’t sufficient left to fuel their internal linking campaign; for muting the monkeys which preach PageRank bankruptcy by outbound linking, I suggest reading this article on DailyBlogTips.com on how linking out will NOT reduce the Google PageRank of your pages.

2. linking out to related websites will often times determine massive returns of favour from the linked to webmasters, thus clouding your link network with a tone of reciprocal links that, makes Google believe it’s witnessing blackhat SEO in action.

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Duplicate content is the starring actor in two distinct scenarios, namely on and off site promotion.

On Site Dupe

This occurs when two or more pages on your site are considered similar enough by the search engines that the search engine doesn’t feel the need to include both of them in its index of webpages. And when a page isn’t included in the SE index,

1. It can’t rank for any keyword phrase;

2. It can’t pass on any link juice or PageRank from pages linking to it;

If a page can’t pass link reputation and PR it’s considered a black hole in the website’s internal linking structure and this leads to poor rankings in SERPs. If a lot of your webpages are considered duplicate content by the search engines your entire website is on a sure death course.

Still, for whitehat websites having 1-3 duplicated pieces of content is considered to be well within the acceptable margins.

The majority of online marketers don’t even know they are practicing this “no, no”. And the most exposed types of websites are thin affiliate sites, ecommerce sites, submission sites with few submissions and blogs.

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What is PageRank?

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm patented and used by Google to measure and rank webpages in its index according to the relative importance each webpage has.

PageRank tends to be presented in two distinct instances, namely Real PageRank used by Google (backdoors), and Toolbar PageRank with values from 0 to 10.

Real PageRank has the same building principle as toolbar PR but its much higher, as a numerical figure (going up to milions), than the PageRank Toolbar scale of 0 to 10.

Basically, Google takes all the real PageRank values of every page in its index and separates them into these eleven different ranges.

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One of the hottest topics in the world of SEO remains the Google Sandbox. The Google Sandbox has taken on a very mysterious and dreaded form in the eyes of many webmasters. It’s therefore extremely important to understand everything you can about the it, why your site could end up there and how you can then work on digging yourself out.

What Triggers the Google Sandbox?

In most cases, the Google Sandbox is used for brand new blogs or websites. A new site that is launched and then very quickly puts out a lot of content and many different pages or posts, for example, could then end up in the Sandbox. This is because it’s actually a SPAM prevention mechanism or filter. A new site with an immediate load of information could be viewed as SPAM.

Therefore you are placed to the side of the index in a way until it’s proven that your site is worthwhile and is not SPAM. Not all new sites get placed into this category however. Much is still unknown about the specific triggers, and much of it may have to do with what else is going on around the web at the time your site was released.

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What is a “Silo Structure” and Why should you be interested

In a nutshell, it has to do with website design and internal linking strategy. Silo structuring promotes the idea of building your website with highly optimized narrow blocks of content grouped in the classical website categories, called silos.

Each of these categories will be treated like individual websites, in other words running thorough on page and off page optimization campaigns.

The end product will be one solid, authority site, sustained by its optimized individual categories and that requires a minimal number of backlinks in order to rank high in SERPs.

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Supplemental index is one of the two index categories (main index being the first one) where Google places certain webpages due to various flaws encountered in the indexing process.

Even though the webpage was relegated from the main index to a supplemental one, it continues to get indexed, with even fewer restrains in Google algorithm. This is the last stop for a page before is being dumped by Google.

Note that SI and Google Sandbox are two different issues; the last tends to appear after agressive backlink campaigns such as high volume on inbound links on short periods of time, disproportional with the website’s traffic, repetitive and “expensive” anchor text, anchor text changes, etc.

Also, consider that the index in which websites are included in are completely automated processes, thus there is no way of changing the index where they appear.

Primary reasons why webpages are redirected to supplemental index

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This entry consists of new content and references to other posts on different stages of the overall backlinking strategy.

The 10 Steps to a Productive Backlink Network

1. Assess your strong points with which you’ll approach potential link partners

Webmasters that you target as potential link partners will have three reasons for linking to you:

> quality content. Although you are new in the industry and have poor site authority, you provide quality content – an ever-green asset that attracts visitors, and increases conversion.

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Getting backlinks from Directory Submission, Press Releases, Articles, Forums, when done consistently and with high competence, makes a big difference in your traffic reports.

Still, this strategy lacks in providing webpages with high PageRank due to massive exploitation by the overall marketing community.

This post will lay down best practices for link building using the submission platforms mentioned above.

Guidelines to submitting your business website to submission directories

There is no doubt we are witnessing a downfall in directory submission quality, but there are still a handfull of them that are worth submiting your business to, such as Yahoo Directory, DMOZ, Best of the Web, Gimpsy and Search Sight.

Here is how to do it:

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Finding partner webmasters for getting backlinks to your webpages is one of the most challenging operations when it comes to Off-Page Optimization.

If building backlinks with submission directories, article directories and social media platforms is largely a matter placed on your own hands, getting backlinks from other niche related sites involves human interaction and success can be rare, especially if you’re new on business, with no authority and little value for veteran online marketers to share.

Nevertheless, there are some strategic aspects for finding link partners upon which I’m going to focus in this post.

Here is what we’re going to cover in the following lines:

1. General rules that must guide your link partners research campaign;

2. Where to look for one way backlinks;

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In order to dominate a niche market your website needs to have a backlink portfolio that meets these three requirements: highly targeted, high quality links – placed in the right spot on the page – with the right anchor text.

Of course, in the process of attaining this goal you’ll be tempted along the road to make use of some rather unproductive shortcuts.

This post will show you what practices resemble more to jumping from a cliff rather then ensuring a pleasant ride.

Backlinking practices you must avoid

1. Don’t outsource your link building campaign UNLESS you verify them  and they have a white hat background and keep a transparent business conduct.

2. Don’t search for “keyword phrase” and “submit site” in Google. The vast majority of results are garbage sites. Read the full story