what is google sandbox?

Back to the original question, Quote: Backlinks, also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links, are incoming links to a website or web page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node.[1] Inbound links were originally important (prior to the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation: today, their significance lies in search engine optimization (SEO). The number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (for example, this is used by Google to determine the PageRank of a webpage). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page. Backlink - Wikipedia How do you get backlinks? As explained in the quote above, when a site links to your site it is a backlink. This can be:Someone that read your article/page and thought is was worth linking to from their own site. This is called natural backlinking because you didn't force the issue. They just thought you were great and decided to link to you without any payback. Depending on what field you are in, you can earn a backlink from an .edu or .gov site without forcing the issue/gaming the system. Someone tweets your link which can snowball into my first point. Someone mentions you on Facebook (or any other social networking/social bookmarking site) also can snowball into the first point. You could buy links from or exchange links with another site but be warned if not handled correctly it could be more damaging than good. You could comment on someone's blog. But do so without sounding spammy. A link in your comment would probably look spammy unless it adds to the conversation. Just be happy with your name being linked to your site to start with. Once you have built a relationship with the blog owner you might get away with linking to your own related posts/articles. Most social sites use the nofollow attribute in their links out to your site. So do some blogs. Quote: nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the rel attribute of an HTML a element to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring. nofollow - Wikipedia At the bottom of the above referenced article is a chart showing the interpretation by the individual search engines is handled for the nofollow attribute. Don't be fooled by the nofollow attribute showing on the links. The site owner could have wasted their time doing that as the page could be picked up in a Sitemap or something else without the nofollow attribute and defeat their purpose of using the nofollow attribute. Also, you don't just want a backlink, you want traffic also. The average surfer isn't even going to know about the nofollow attribute. They are going to see your link or comment and click the link to see what you are all about. Quote: How does Google handle nofollowed links? In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways. About rel="nofollow" - Google Webmaster Tools Help