Your website’s ranking in search engines is an important part of your overall marketing campaign, and there are legitimate ways to improve your link popularity. Unfortunately, the Internet also has plenty of dishonest webmasters trying to manipulate search engines by artificially inflating their link popularity.
The good news is that search engines have caught on. They now watch for “spam” pages and sites that have boosted their rankings through artificial methods. When a search engine identifies one of these sites, it may demote the site in the rankings or remove it from its index entirely.
The bad news is that some high-quality, completely legitimate sites can be mistaken for offenders. Your page could get caught in the “spam” net and removed from a search engine’s index, even if you have done nothing wrong. Fortunately, there are steps you can take — and mistakes you should avoid — to reduce the risk of this kind of misperception.
Link popularity is largely based on the quality of the 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 increase your link popularity, but you also need to be extremely careful about which sites you choose to link to. Google frequently imposes penalties on sites that link to other sites solely to artificially boost link popularity. They have actually labeled these links “bad neighborhoods.”
You can be relieved that you cannot be penalized simply because a bad neighborhood links to your site. The penalty usually happens when you are the one linking out to a bad neighborhood. Still, you should check, and double-check, every active link on your links page to make sure you have not linked to one.
The first thing to check is whether 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. Once installed, you will see that most pages are assigned a “Pagerank,” 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. In many cases, these pages have likely been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, you may catch their penalty, and like the flu, it can 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. These sites have not been penalized, and their links may grow in value and popularity over time. However, you should monitor these links closely to make sure they do not later receive a penalty after you have linked to them from your links page.
Another tactic dishonest webmasters use to artificially boost link popularity is hidden text. Search engines usually consider the words on a web page when forming rankings. That means if the text on your page contains your keywords, you have a better chance of improving your search engine ranking than a page that does not include keyword-rich text.
Some webmasters try to exploit this by hiding keywords so visitors cannot see them. For example, they may place keywords in the same color as the page background, such as a large block of white keywords on a white background. A human visitor cannot see these words, but a 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 may boost that page’s ranking.
Webmasters may be clever, and sometimes devious, but search engines have figured out these tricks. As soon as a search engine detects hidden text — splat! — the page is penalized.
The downside is that a spider can sometimes be overzealous and penalize a page by mistake. For example, if your page background is gray and you have placed gray text inside a black box, the spider may only notice the gray text and assume you are using hidden text. To avoid the risk of a false penalty, tell your webmaster never to assign text the same color as the page background — ever.
Another potential problem that can lead to a penalty is called “keyword stuffing.” It is important to have your keywords appear in the text on your page, but it is possible to go overboard in trying to please the spiders. A search engine uses what is called “Keyphrase Density” to determine whether a site is trying to artificially boost its ranking. This is the ratio of keywords to the rest of the words on the page. Search engines set limits on how often you can use a keyword before deciding you have overdone it and penalizing your site.
This ratio is fairly high, so it is difficult to exceed without sounding as if you are stuttering — unless your keyword is part of your company name. If that is the case, your keyword density can rise quickly. So, if your keyword is “make money onlie for free ,” be sure you do not use this phrase in every sentence. Carefully edit the text on your site so the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not repeated endlessly. A good rule of thumb is that your keyword should never appear in more than half the sentences on the page.
The final potential risk factor is known as “cloaking.” For diligent Trekkies, this concept should be easy to understand. For everyone else, 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 improve the site’s search engine ranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everything it needs to push that page’s ranking to the top of the list.
Naturally, search engines have responded to this deception with serious penalties. The problem is that pages are sometimes cloaked for legitimate reasons, such as preventing code theft, often referred to as “pagejacking.” This kind of shielding is unnecessary these days because of the use of “off page” elements, such as link popularity, that cannot be stolen.
To be safe, make sure your webmaster understands that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Be clear that cloaking of any kind can put your website at serious risk.
Just as you need to be diligent about increasing your link popularity and improving your ranking, you must be equally diligent about avoiding unfair penalties. Monitor your site closely, and avoid anything that could look like an attempt to artificially boost your rankings.
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