@ Ali, so it’s not just me! I’m thinking that this is pretty normal. I know your niche is a pretty competitive one, so the sandbox police must be out in full force. I’m sure things will get much better after some time.

@ Glen, thanks for this info! I figured the deal was something like that. I’ll keep doing what I’m doing, and see how it gets sorted out in the end. My ranking has actually gone up a bit since the time I posted this!

@ Oscar, I’ve seen some of the stuff on EzineArticles, so I figured they can’t be too picky.

Thanks for the review! Happy to leave my thoughts:

With one of his link building methods alone, I created several dozen links to each site. That worked just fine, and it theoretically should be enough to rank me on the first search results page for my keywords. The problem is that the search engines aren’t recognizing the links yet.

There can be quite a delay in this, I even see this for my established sites like PluginID. Note that Yahoo are MUCH quicker at picking up links than Google.

I wonder if this may be part of the sandbox effect. I know that new sites are on a sort of probationary status, where they rank artificially low in the search results until they reach a certain age. A site may stay in the sandbox for several months or bypass it entirely, depending on the niche. Maybe the sandbox also limits the backlinks that are recognized. Just a guess though.

Generally, the process from my experience goes: Rank high very quickly for a day or 2 (I think they do this incase it’s an important site that people are looking for) > rankings drop to nowhere > rankings start to come back to 3rd or 2nd page > more links brings them onto the first page.

To be honest, the backlink counts for individual sites on search engines have never been great. I worked with a large SEO team for almost two years and it frustrated us every month when doing client reports. We would see a site with over 100,000 backlinks ‘lose’ 50,000 one day and a week later have 150,000.

Similarly, it would be common for the backlink count to change as you go through different pages of the results for your own site. They have never really been accurate with this to be fair.

Final Thoughts

Some keyphrases I can rank very quickly for, I’m talking about one week, and start making money. This is often because they’re uncompetitive keyphrases or the search terms have a low search volume (depends what I’m going for).

However, in other cases it can take over a month to see results. I do think patience is key with this part of the process. I have seen so many people making money via CL now that I can’t doubt that it is working.

If you check out Remarkably Clever, the author is also doing a case study of her process. She left a comment on my blog after 2 weeks saying she had made her first sales: 2 in one day in fact.

Keep it up, and thanks for the review!

I’m a platinum member with ezine articles, and found that this was quite an effective way to build links – though I got the the point of going slowly crazy with writing yet another article on pretty much the same topic.

I’m waiting to see what happens a few months down the line with my minisite, once I’ve built some more backlinks and waited for it to emerge from the sandbox. Will write a post for my blog at that point about my experience with it…

I found the tactic of submitting articles to Ezine to increase google page ranks very interesting. Never thought of that before. Am I living in a cave? A cave full of sushi? Wow, that would be nice.