Securing Your Search Engine Rankings

Your website's position on search engines is a crucial part of your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to augment your link popularity through real strategies. 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 positions by artificial methods. When a search engines tracks down such a site, that site is demoted in position or completely removed from the search engine's index.

The bad news is that some high value, completely above-board sites are being mistaken for these web page crooks. Your page may be in danger of being caught up in the "spam" net and thrown 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 make sure NOT to do - which will stop this kind of misperception.

Link popularity is mainly based on the class of sites you are linked to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigning website standing, and virtually all search engines on the Internet now utilize it. There are useful ways to go about increasing your link popularity, but at the same time, you must be scrupulously cautious about which sites you select to link to. Google often 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 punished when a bad neighborhood links to your site; consequence 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 punished. 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 totally gray. It is more than likely that these pages have been punished. If you are linked to these pages, you may catch their penalty, and like the flu, it may be tough 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 chastised, and their links may increase in value and popularity. However, do make sure that you closely watch these kind of links to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a consequence once you have linked up to them from your links page.

Another cruel trick that illicit webmasters use to artificially improvement their link popularity is the use of camouflaged text. Search engines generally utilize the words on web pages as a aspect in forming their rankings, which means that if the text on your page contains your keywords, you have more of an opportunity to lift your search engine standing 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 imperceptible 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 view these words with the human eye - but the eye of search engine spider can identify them easily! A spider is the program search engines utilize to index web pages, and when it sees these unseen words, it goes back and raises that page's link ranking.

Webmasters may be smart and sometimes devious, but search engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as a search engine realize the use of camouflaged text - splat! The page is punished.

The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit overzealous and will punish a page on accident. 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 disguised text. To avoid any risk of false penalty, simply ask your webmaster not to assign the same color to text as the background color of the page - ever!

Another feasible issue that can result in a penalty is labelled "keyword stuffing." It is vital to have your keywords appear in the text on your page, but sometimes you can go a little overboard in your excitement to please those spiders. A search engine utilizes what is known as "Keyphrase Density" to determine if a site is attempting to artificially boost their standing. 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 utilize a keyword before it decides you have overdone it and penalizes your site.

This ratio is quite high, so it is tough 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 simple for keyword density to soar. So, if your keyword is "renters insurance," be sure you don't utilize 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 satisfactory rule of thumb is your keyword should never appear in more than half the sentences on the page.

The final possible risk factor is known as "cloaking." To those of you who are diligent Trekkies, this concept should be easy to learn. 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 usual traffic, and deliberately set-up to improve the site's search engine position. A cloaked page attempts 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 reacted to this act of dishonesty with extreme hostility, imposing high penalties on these sites. The issue 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, make sure that your webmaster is aware that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make sure the webmaster understands that cloaking of any type will put your website at great risk.

Just as you must be attentive in increasing your link popularity and your ranking, you must be equally attentive to stop being unfairly punished. So make sure to watch your site closely and stop any appearance of artificially lifting your rankings.
 


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Schwartz, is the founder of Promotions Unlimited,an Internet legal directory (CA, TX & Las Vegas ) publisher and search engine placement technology analyst.  You can contact Bob via e-mail at  seo711@gmail.com or visit his San Diego legal directory at:  http://www.sandiegolawyerforyou.com/special.htm