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Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings |
By James Williams
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 http://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
overzealous 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.
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About the
author
James
Williams is
a retired
bricks and
mortar
retail
executive
who now runs
his own home
based
Internet
business,
publishing
and
marketing
how-to
business
information.
Website:
www.DigitalDollars101.com
Email:
jim2000bizinfo@aol.com
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