Your website''s ranking on search engines is a vital element of your
overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to improve your link
popularity through legitimate methods. Unfortunately, the Internet is
populated by bands of dishonest webmasters seeking to improve their link
popularity by faking out search engines.
The good news is that search engines have figured this out, and are now
on guard for "spam" pages and sites that have increased their rankings
by artificial methods. When a search engines tracks down such a site,
that site is demoted in ranking or completely removed from the search
engine''s index.
The bad news is that some high quality, completely above-board sites are
being mistaken for these web page criminals. Your page may be in danger
of being caught up in the "spam" net and tossed from a search
engine''s
index, even though you have done nothing to deserve such harsh
treatment. But there are things you can do - and things you should be
sure NOT to do - which will prevent this kind of misperception.
Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are linked
to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigning website ranking, and
virtually all search engines on the Internet now use it. There are
legitimate ways to go about increasing your link popularity, but at the
same time, you must be scrupulously careful about which sites you choose
to link to. Google frequently imposes penalties on sites that have
linked to other sites solely for the purpose of artificially boosting
their link popularity. They have actually labeled these links "bad
neighborhoods."
You can raise a toast to the fact that you cannot be penalized when a
bad neighborhood links to your site; penalty happens only when you are
the one sending out the link to a bad neighborhood. But you must check,
and double-check, all the links that are active on your links page to
make sure you haven''t linked to a bad neighborhood.
The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages you have linked
to have been penalized. The most direct way to do this is to download
the Google toolbar at toolbar.google.com. You will then see that most
pages are given a "Pagerank" which is represented by a sliding green
scale on the Google toolbar.
Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on the scale. This is
especially important when the scale is completely gray. It is more than
likely that these pages have been penalized. If you are linked to these
pages, you may catch their penalty, and like the flu, it may be
difficult to recover from the infection.
There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whose scale shows only
a tiny sliver of green on their scale.
These sites have not been penalized, and their links may grow in value
and popularity. However, do make sure that you closely monitor these
kind of links to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a
penalty once you have linked up to them from your links page.
Another evil trick that illicit webmasters use to artificially boost
their link popularity is the use of hidden text. Search engines usually
use the words on web pages as a factor in forming their rankings, which
means that if the text on your page contains your keywords, you have
more of an opportunity to increase your search engine ranking than a
page that does not contain text inclusive of keywords.
Some webmasters have gotten around this formula by hiding their keywords
in such a way so that they are invisible to any visitors to their site.
For example, they have used the keywords but made them the same color as
the background color of the page, such as a plethora of white keywords
on a white background. You cannot see these words with the human eye -
but the eye of search engine spider can spot them easily! A spider is
the program search engines use to index web pages, and when it sees
these invisible words, it goes back and boosts that page''s link
ranking.
Webmasters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, but search engines
have figured these tricks out. As soon as a search engine perceive the
use of hidden text - splat! the page is penalized.
The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit noverzealous
and will penalize a page by mistake. For example, if the background
color of your page is gray, and you have placed gray text inside a black
box, the spider will only take note of the gray text and assume you are
employing hidden text. To avoid any risk of false penalty, simply direct
your webmaster not to assign the same color to text as the background
color of the page - ever!
Another potential problem that can result in a penalty is called
"keyword stuffing." It is important to have your keywords appear in
the
text on your page, but sometimes you can go a little overboard in your
enthusiasm to please those spiders. A search engine uses what is called
"Keyphrase Density" to determine if a site is trying to artificially
boost their ranking. This is the ratio of keywords to the rest of the
words on the page. Search engines assign a limit to the number of times
you can use a keyword before it decides you have overdone it and
penalizes your site.
This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpass without sounding
as if you are stuttering - unless your keyword is part of your company
name. If this is the case, it is easy for keyword density to soar. So,
if your keyword is "renters insurance," be sure you don''t use
this
phrase in every sentence. Carefully edit the text on your site so that
the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not repeated incessantly. A
good rule of thumb is your keyword should never appear in more than half
the sentences on the page.
The final potential risk factor is known as "cloaking." To those of
you
who are diligent Trekkies, this concept should be easy to understand.
For the rest of you?cloaking is when the server directs a visitor to one
page and a search engine spider to a different page. The page the spider
sees is "cloaked" because it is invisible to regular traffic, and
deliberately set-up to raise the site''s search engine ranking. A
cloaked
page tries to feed the spider everything it needs to rocket that page''s
ranking to the top of the list.
It is natural that search engines have responded to this act of
deception with extreme enmity, imposing steep penalties on these sites.
The problem on your end is that sometimes pages are cloaked for
legitimate reasons, such as prevention against the theft of code, often
referred to as "pagejacking." This kind of shielding is unnecessary
these days due to the use of "off page" elements, such as link
popularity, that cannot be stolen.
To be on the safe side, be sure that your webmaster is aware that
absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make sure the webmaster
understands that cloaking of any kind will put your website at great
risk.
Just as you must be diligent in increasing your link popularity and your
ranking, you must be equally diligent to avoid being unfairly penalized.
So be sure to monitor your site closely and avoid any appearance of
artificially boosting your rankings.
http://seos.awardspace.com
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