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. 1: 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. 2: 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.
3: 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. 4:
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).
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.
About the author:
David Hennebery is the owner and creator of a very successful
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