Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I am a newbie webmaster with a first website. We launched our site in mid Nov. and with one link from a blog and a couple of dollars worth of adwords a day had on average 50 visitors a day for the first two months of being online.
About a month ago got featured on a very popular blog. From this have seen a burst of links and traffic. Within a one week period we went from having maybe 5 inbound links (not counting weird rss feed links) to having around a dozen from PR 6-8 sites, 100+ from a variety of blogs, and over a thousand from social bookmarking sites. We are still getting a couple of new links weekly, but the bulk of it happened in that one week period.
As traffic is settling down from the blogs, we now get a few hits a day on google only for really specific keywords. I am starting to see some traffic with good keywords coming from MSN only. We are indexed well in google, just not ranking.
From what I have read, I am concerned that we may or may not rank well in google, and if we do it could be 6, 9, 10 months etc. At this point, after reading all these depressing sandbox posts my questions are:
1. Does the fact that some of our inbound links are from some pretty decent sites help offset any penalties or filters... or are the numbers and timeframe the largest factor?
2. Do social bookmarking sites affect google positively or negatively or neutral.
3. Is there anything I could or should do to help make us not look like a red flag type of website.
4. Is having affiliate links a big google no-no? If you were worried about sandbox filters would you drop them totally till you ranked - i took them off for now... they were on an individual page only.
5. If you were me, would you continue to develop this site, or would you focus on creating another until this one emerged (would continued link building just make it worse, or would it help us).
We have made a LOT of mistakes in the last few months, and I would love any insights that would help us avoid even more.
Thanks!
I would love any insights that would help us avoid even more.
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