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 engine 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
criterion 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 labelled these links "bad neighbourhoods."
You can raise a
toast to the fact that you cannot be penalized when a bad neighbourhood links
to your site; penalty happens only when you are the one sending out the link to
a bad neighbourhood. 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
neighbourhood.
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 grey. 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
kinds 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 colour as the background colour 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 colour of your page is grey, and you
have placed grey text inside a black box, the spider will only take note of the
grey text and assume you are employing hidden text. To avoid any risk of false
penalty, simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same colour to text as
the background colour 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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