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Are Your Search Engine Rankings At
Risk?
© 2003
by Scott Buresh
Ever since there have been search engines, there have
been techniques that unscrupulous webmasters and shady
search engine optimization firms have used to artificially
boost rankings. As search engines caught on to these
techniques, they devised ways to detect them without having
someone physically look at each site (a practical
impossibility, considering that several individual engines
now index well over a billion pages). While most engines are
becoming more adept at detecting "spam" pages and
penalizing or removing them, there is an unfortunate side
effect to this efficiency- some companies that are innocent
of intentional wrongdoing unknowingly have sites that fall
into the "spam" category. What follows is a list
of some of the issues that can hurt such sites, followed by
suggestions of how to prevent penalization or removal.
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Issue #1: Bad Links.
Much of the internet is founded on sites linking to one
another (a search engine itself is really just a very large
collection of links). However, with the relatively recent
emphasis placed upon a site's links as part of the ranking
formula (commonly called "link popularity"), it
has become crucial to carefully select and closely monitor
the sites with which you exchange links. Google, the pioneer
of this ranking methodology, often penalizes sites that
provide links to what they call "bad neighborhoods"-
sites that Google determines serve no purpose save for
artificially boosting link popularity. It is important to
note that sites are only penalized when they actively link
to another site, not when a site links to them (which is
only fair, as webmasters have no real control over what
sites choose to link to theirs). If any page of your site
contains links to outside sites, it is important to make
certain that these outside sites are not being penalized.
The easiest way to do this on Google is to download the
Google toolbar (available at http://toolbar.google.com/).
Most pages that you find on the internet have been assigned
a "Pagerank", which is represented by a sliding
green scale on the toolbar (visit the link to see an
example). To be safe, avoid linking to any site that does
not show any green on this scale (most importantly when this
scale is grayed out). Such sites may be penalized, and
linking to them may get your site penalized in turn (do not,
however, refrain from exchanging links with sites simply
because they show just a sliver of green- these sites are
not being penalized and links from them may become more
valuable over time). It is also very important to monitor
the sites that you link to periodically to make certain that
they have not been penalized since you originally added
their link to your site.
Issue #2: Hidden Text.
Almost all search engines use the words on the pages of
web sites as one factor in their ranking equation. This
means that if the text on your pages includes your
keyphrases, you have a better chance of ranking highly for
those phrases than a competing page that does not include
them. Some webmasters, aware of this but not wanting their
visitors to actually see the text (usually for
"aesthetic" reasons), began taking keyphrase-rich
text and making it the same color as the page background.
For example, if a page had a white background, they would
add text to the page, loaded with keyphrases, in the same
shade of white. A human visitor would not be able to see the
text, but the search engine "spider" (the programs
that search engines use to go out and index web pages)
would, and it would get a ranking boost accordingly.
However, engines soon caught on and began penalizing pages
that used this tactic. Unfortunately, some innocent sites
are still penalized for this, even though the text on their
pages is visible. Say, for example, that the background of a
page is white. On this white background is a large blue box
that has white text within it. Even though the text is
clearly visible to the visitor, the search engine is not
smart enough to realize that the white text appears in a
blue box- it just assumes that the white text has been
placed on a white background. To avoid any potential
problems, it is important that you let your webmaster know
that the text on your pages should never be the same color
as the assigned background color
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Issue #3: Keyword Stuffing.
As mentioned above, the words on your pages can be an
important factor in the ranking of your web pages. However,
it is entirely possible to have too much of a good thing.
"Keyphrase Density", as it is commonly called, is
the ratio of keyphrases on your page to the overall number
of words on the page. While different engines prefer
different keyphrase density, almost all have an upper limit,
after which pages can be penalized. In most cases, this
threshold would be hard to break without the text sounding
inane. However, particularly when a keyphrase is part of a
company name, density can accidentally become unnaturally
high. For example, if your company name was "Atlanta
Plumbing Pros" and you styled your text so that this
company name was used in almost every sentence, you would
have a dangerously high density for the phrase "Atlanta
Plumbing" and would be at risk of penalization. To
correct any potential problems, go over the text on each of
your pages and make certain that it reads naturally and that
no phrases are repeated too frequently (for example in more
than half of the sentences).
Issue #4: Cloaking
Cloaking, loosely defined, is the practice of showing a
search engine spider a different page than what an actual
human visitor sees. This means that the server of a cloaked
page makes a note of the unique address assigned to each
visitor, and when that visitor is a spider, it feeds it
specialized content that is designed to rank highly for
certain search terms. Virtually every major engine now
imposes harsh penalties on sites that use cloaking (although
a few of them will allow you to pay them for the privilege,
but that's a topic for a future article). Unfortunately, the
intent of cloaking isn't always necessarily to trick search
engines. Some high-ranking pages are cloaked simply to
prevent others from stealing the underlying code (such theft
is commonly called "pagejacking"). This concern,
however, is somewhat unfounded today. With the increased
emphasis of "off the page" elements, such as link
popularity, an unscrupulous webmaster could steal the code
from a high-ranking page and replicate it exactly without
achieving the same high rankings. In any case, the practice
of cloaking, for whatever reason, puts your site at risk of
being penalized or removed from major engines, so make sure
that your webmaster does not employ the technique.
Conclusion:
Search engines are becoming increasingly cognizant of
the techniques used to try to fool them, and they are also
becoming better at detecting and removing pages that violate
their terms of service. It's important to remember
that search engines make decisions on how to rank pages
based upon extensive studies of their users and their
preferences, and any webmaster or optimization firm that
claims to know better (and subsequently uses underhanded
techniques) is doing a disservice to their client.
Unfortunately, however, sometimes the spam detection methods
that the engines use target good sites that inadvertently
meet the criteria for removal or penalization. By paying
attention to the four issues above, you can help ensure that
your site isn't one of them.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Scott Buresh is Co-founder and Principal of <a
Medium Blue Internet
Marketing . For monthly tips on how to get the most out
of your internet presence, sign up for our Internet
Marketing Newsletter
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