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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.
Michael Rasmussen is a successful Internet Marketing
Consultant and author of many top-selling eBooks. Michael
has been marketing online since the early days and he
knows what it takes to make money and succeed online.
Stop by his Web site and subscribe to his Fr*e monthly
newsletter full strategies and techniques for successful
web site promotions that can help YOU!
Go to
http://www.search-engines-revealed.com
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