All Posts Tagged With: "blogs"
Ideas for Starting New Blogs - Part 3
On Blogs for Sale we have been writing a series of articles about ideas for starting new blogs. We have been discussing a site we started called “Hurricane Tracking Sites“. This site was started, indexed by Google, and getting hundreds of hits in a matter of hours.
Now, after spending six weeks as a page i Google result for the keywords “hurricane tracking sites” it has vanished from the Search Engine results. It is not in the the top 1000 results. The site has been effectively sandboxed.
What is a sandbox. Here is the Wikipedia definition:
The Sandbox (a.k.a. Sandboxing or the sandbox effect) is a phenomenon that people have claimed to observe in the ranking of web pages that is performed by Google. It is the subject of much debate. Its existence has not been confirmed, and several observers state that they have observed the contrary to what is claimed for this perceived phenomenon.
The phenomenon that people have claimed to observe is that Google temporarily reduces the page rank of new domains, placing them into what is referred to as its “sandbox”, in an effort to counter the ways that search engine optimizers attempt to manipulate Google’s page ranking to bring sites to the top, by creating lots of inbound links to a new web site from other web sites that they own before creating that web site. A “reverse sandbox” effect is also claimed to exist, whereby new pages with good content but without inbound links are temporarily increased in rank, much like the “New Releases” in a book store are displayed more prominently, to encourage organic building of the World Wide Web.
David George disputes the claim, made by some, that Google applies sandboxing to all new web sites, saying that the claim “doesn’t seem to be born out by experience”. He states that he created a new web site in October 2004 and had it ranked in the top 20 Google results for a target keyword within 1 month. He avers that “[n]o one knows for sure if the Google sandbox exists”, and comments that it “seems to fit the observations and experients of many search engine optimizers”. He theorizes that the sandbox “has introduced some hysteresis into the system in order to restore a bit of sanity to Google’s results”.
Matt Cutts has stated in an interview that “there are some things in the algorithm that may be perceived as a sandbox that doesn’t apply to all industries”.
The site will eventually come back. It could be back in three months, or it could take a year. This is perhaps one fo the best reasons to buy a blog that has been around for a while. If I was depending on the Hurricane Tracking Sites blog has an integral part of my blogging business and I had to wait out the sandbox effect it could be very frustrating. My hope is that the site comes back before the next hurricane season starts.
Ideas for Starting New Blogs - Part 2
in our last article on Blogs for Sale we introduced you to a website we had started called Hurricane Tracking Sites. This site was started six days ago. It went from an idea to being indexed by Google in a matter of a few hours. This is certainly not a typical response to a new blog. The site continues to be a page 1 Google return and in its first three days it had over 400 page views. The page views have dropped off significantly over the last two days as there are not any hurricanes to track at the moment. This will allow us to make some improvements to the site at a more regular pace. Because of the site’s immediate popularity, we had to throw a lot of things on the site in a hurry. The information we put on the site needed to useful and factual, and we believe we have the foundation for a very successful blog. The site could still easily undergo a sandbox period, but it remains a blog with great potential in the future.
The idea for the site all came from an Internet search while I was sitting in the path of a storm. This is a great way to develop ideas for your own blog. What are you searching for on the Internet? What are you interested in? What would you like to know more about? My advice is to keep an open mind to what you are searching for in the near future. The more natural the search, the better the idea for a blog will probably be. Sometimes, trying to think of an idea makes it hard to think of anything. The ideas that spring out of normal interaction with the Internet are often the best potential blogs. Once you have a good idea, you still need to do a little research before you launch the site. While our research on the tracking site was not as extensive as usual, a quik check on keyword usage, existing sites, and the competition was done before we jumped in to it. Our initial plan was to just market the site to our existing readers, many of whom live in coastal areas, but the Search Engines made that unecessary for the time being.
Why Buy a Blog
At Blogs for Sale we develop blogs for the purpose of selling them. You have a lot of options when it comes to develpoing your own blog. You can start really good blogs for free if you want to. You could get a domain name and a web host and develop a really good blog for under $100. So, why buy a blog?
The biggest reason is time. How much is your time worth? Developing a blog takes a lot of time. It takes time to set up. It takes time to build links. It takes time for your site to begin to position itself well on search engine results. These blogs are being developed for people who are hoping to use a blog for business. Buying an existing blog will greatly speed up your ability to drive traffic to your site. These sites are developed with a theme in place designed to help them with SEO. We also start pointing links at the site, which helps them begin to gain some importance with Google.
We also include six hours of blog consulting with each of the blogs we sell. We provide a wide range of training (check out Blog Consulting for an idea of the services we can provide). If you are interested in purchasing one of our blogs, use the Contact page to let us know. We will discuss your needs and develop a plan for you. The price for your blog will depend on different factors, but the range of prices runs between $1000 - $2000 dollars. That price includes the domain name (domain names are often sold for hundreds of dollars), a premium theme which has been tweaked for SEO optimization (a $100 value), six hours of training (a $600 value), and a blog which is already indexed and established with Google. So, what is your time worth?
