Autobiography of The SEO Flea

Since i don't know anything about dead links or broken links in any SEO terms, allow me to simply explain this thought and knowledge just as brief and short as i can. Broken links or dead links are actually links in your webpage that leads one way or another to nothing. It means that you are linking to a virtually non existing webpage or website. This broken links to most may not have a devastating effect to your online business but the fact is that these broken links or dead links are a great hindrance to search engine bots in terms of crawling and indexing a webpage or website in a continuous manner without interruptions and factors that could cause the bots to stop the indexing and crawling process.

How Dead Links Can Harm Your SEO Efforts:

Link management is a very important and a very essential part of maintaining any website or online business today. Since links are the most important factor of a website or webpage, therefore, it should also be regarded as the holy grail of SEO and of website maintenance and management. These links are very crucial in almost all aspects of a website's continued building up of complete trust from search engines and should always be taken care of to maximum handling sensitivity. PR (page rank) for one is a common knowledge that the search engines base their trust rate on every website or webpage existing today in the search engine index in terms of numerical value basis. The total accumulation of links is the best factor where these search engines base their trust rank and page rank. If in any case these links wont favor the standards of any search engines, these could cause either change of the algorhytm implemented therein by the SEs. It could either go your way or could go against your way on the other hand.

In terms of visitors, for example, if you have important links leading to other webpages and a visitor came across with your website links. After sorting out those links that your page have and eventually getting at that special information he deems he needs and ending up into a dead link or a broken link, then for sure, that visitor, upon seeing nothing at all would surely decide to go away and exit from your site and possibly never return anymore for the information that he needs. Believing that your pages does not genuinely offer good contents and valid links to important informations, other visitors upon finding the same fate on your links would also do the same thing which could badly hurt your traffic stats. This could cause your website to loose the traffic that any website needs to survive that battle of traffic generation to business. If you won't have any remedies to this problem at the shortest quickest possible time, i would predict then that you will go nowhere in terms of SEO and traffic.

Dead Links:

Dead links are links that lead to non existing website/s or webpage/s. It may either be a non-existing data or a non-existing page in the internet caused by so many factors. These factors vary depending on the case of the non-availability of the webpage. Some of them i can only mention were caused by expired domains, dns server problems, xml problems, mistyped url, 404 error, unacceptable 301 redirects, apache problems, too big a file or linking to sites that uses big images that takes too long to load in browsers and many more. All these factors you should keep in mind could cause you to loose the search engine bots from completely indexing your whole webpage. These broken links can stop search engine bots dead in its tracks, effectively preventing it from completely indexing a website.

How Do You Find Dead Links or Broken Links:

There are actually two choices you have in finding that culprit broken link. One is by manually looking for them and the other is by the use of a sitemap generation tool abundant in the internet these days. Since broken links or dead links are very hard to find as you have to manually go through all the pages in your website, then i would suggest that to simply find them out at such a short period of time, you ought to use the Google sitemap generator tool. This could save you a lot in terms of time and effort which you could instead use for other fruitful ways for your website maintenance. The data you can get and gather out of the sitemap will be used to pinpoint the exact location of the dead link and you could find the remedy of replacing it or fixing it at once which could work to your advantage. The Google sitemap generation tool data where the location of the url that the broken link is located can be downloaded at a short cost of $5.00 only as fee that can be paid through paypal.

Link Building Terms and Definitions:

Delay Filter - In aspects and matters of link building, delay filter is that theory where the site or any site that has just been uploaded in the web with an age as young as six months up to 9 months does not get the importance and trust that it needs to get to be able to make it to the link archives of the serps and avoid delay of getting indexed by search engines without any delay. The "Delay Filter Theory" states that if either properly optimized pages or unoptimized pages are made available to the search engines for crawl and indexing, the said site may either be on the top pages of the serps at its first month but after a few more weeks or so they say will eventually drop down from its original listing and eventually disappear because of what webmasters call as "aging delay" of "delay filter". This delay filter or aging delay that Google is implementing in some if not all sites is for the purpose of avoiding and minimizing excessive spamming. Originally, this delay filter or aging delay is used to block spams and is intended at blocking unwanted e- mail spams , phishing and viruses, according to byteplant.com, a website dedicated to providing anti-spam softwares and removing spams on your e-mails.

Do remember that the aging delay or delay filter is a natural algorhytm that is part of the Google dance where all you need to do is to be patient at the things that are happening to your websites because if you do anything drastic in hopes to remove your suspected dropping out of the serps by Google and other search engines, then you might as well suffer more on your rankings instead of gaining the respect from engines that you are ailing to get. The only thing and in fact the best thing to do is to just continue to do more of your regular link building measures and in no time you will surely go back to the top of the rankings. Link building is the core solution to everything in the web therefore it should be the first, the last and the only thing a webmaster should do at all times and without hesitation. It has been proven through ages that this will work, has worked and will never fail to work as long as you avoid the automated link building softwares that are out there. Take note: Avoid automated link building softwares as much as possible, instead go for manual submission.

Sandbox Effect - Oftentimes just called as the sandbox, this theory has dominated the many forums and forum threads that i have been able to visit a hundred times or even more . The sandbox effect or the sandbox theory is a webmaster's most favorite dumping trash can for the things that happen to their business or personal sites such as disappearing from or getting lost in the serps after ranking high on certain target keywords. The most common belief by SEO personalities and webmasters is that by obtaining too many or too much links at such a short period of time websites could get results that might cause it from getting banned or penalized by search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN for spamming.

Although this has never been proven as an theory or exact science, many have actually experienced this sandbox effect and have given so many headaches to most webmasters who are over eager at building links for obtaining higher rankings in the serps. The most important point of the discussion here is that in building the inks needed for a website to rank on certain target keywords, you must also be patient and keep at phase. Keeping at phase means that you should try and balance out the link building tactics that you have to apply for your sites. There are actually many ways to implement this and one is to have as many collections of sites for your link building spree like blogs, forums, article submissions, directory submissions, feeds, RSS, social book markings, e-mail marketing, viral marketing and many more.

The Difference Between Delay Filter and Sandbox Theory:

These two are very simple terms and yet many times have been mistaken as one identity. The Sandbox Theory is about getting penalized or disappearing from the search results pages (serps) because of obtaining too much links at such a short period of time while the Delay Filter is about a new site that does not appear in the search results or has been struggling to get the rankings that it needs to be able to make it to the serp top pages. This period is said to last sometimes up to 9 months from as early as 6 months of not appearing in the search engine results pages. Basically it simply works like this, the sandbox is some sort of a penalty for spamming while the delay filter is some sort of a preventive measure being implemented by search engines, specifically Google. Prevention and sanction are two very different words both in terms of meaning and in terms of essence in SEO and in the web.

What to Do to Avoid Sandbox and Get out of Delay Filter Implementation:

To avoid sandbox, simply avoid spamming the search engines and this can only be done by avoiding building up too much or too many links to your websites. For short, avoid as much as possible, using automated link building softwares, link farms, bad link neighborhood ( adult sites, gambling sites, pornographic sites, etc ) and not following the rules of submissions to directories or any other link building sites that you feel might help you out on your quest for pure balanced and quality optimized links.

While sandbox can be avoided, the delay filter or aging delay is not much to be feared nor avoided because this happens by natural causes and this thought does not necessarily mean as a correlation to bad link building habits unlike sandbox penalty so be patient at this. The most basic tip that i can give to you to avoid this is just to continue building a balanced link or have a balanced link building system to follow your step by step target of getting to the top of the serps. Try to list down those collection of websites that you plan to use for link building. This way
you could at least see what choices you have and what waypoints to go to. The most important thing is knowing where you want to go in terms of link building.