Protect Your Search Engine Rankings by Zamri Nanyan
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.
About the Author
Zamri Nanyan is a team leader in a fast-growing internet home based business.
Find out how Zamri and his team can help you become more successful online at
http://success.mlmlessons.com
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