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Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings
(C)
Michael Rasmussen
All Rights Reserved
http://www.search-engines-revealed.com
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 Free
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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