Sunday, October 12, 2008

How to Make Sure Your Site Doesn't Get Penalized

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 legit 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 here is that search engines have figured this out, and are now on guard for spam and sites that have increased their rankings by artificial methods. When a search engines discover these sites, the 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 treatment.

There are things you can do, and things you shouldn't do to, that will prevent this kind of misperception.

Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are linked to. Google created 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 take comfort in knowning that your site cant be penalized when a bad neighborhood links to your site. Penalties happen 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 initiated a bad link.

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 toolbar.google.com. You will then see that most pages are given a Pagerank which is represented by a 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 concerned with regart to linking to sites whose scale shows only a tiny bit of green on their scale. These sites have not been penalized, and their links may grow in value and popularity.

Another trick that illegitimate 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 by just looking at a page, but a search engine spider can spot them easily. As soon as a search engine perceive the use of hidden text it is logged and 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.

Search engines use Keyword 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 go over without sounding as if you are truly stuffing the site.

Using one way links for your Web Promotion gets results. This is because link popularity is one of the most important factors in search engine performance. Increasing the number of links to your Website will get your site listed higher in search engine results, generating more Website Traffic, increasing your Google PR and improving your site's overall strength. Click here for one way links.

No comments: