Search Engine Rankings and How to Keep them

Website rankings search engines are a vital element of your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to improve your link popularity through legitimate methods. Unfortunately, the Internet is populated with droves of dishonest webmasters seeking to improve their SERPs 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 ranking by artificial methods. When a search engine tracks down such a site, that site is demoted in ranking or completely removed from the search engine’s index.

Some high quality sites are being mistaken for these web page hooligans. Your page may be in danger of the “spam” nets and tossed from a search engine’s index, even though you have done nothing to warrant it. But there are things you can do - and things you should be sure NOT to do.

Link Popularity
Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of 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 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 boosting their link popularity. They have actually labeled these links “bad neighborhoods.”

You will likely be penalized when a bad neighborhood links to your site; penalty happens only when you are the one sending out the link to a bad neighborhood. But you must constantly check all the links that are active on your links page to make sure you haven’t created bad links.

Link Penalties
The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages you linked to have been penalized. The easiest way to do this is to download the Google toolbar. You will see that most pages are given a “Pagerank” which is represented by a sliding green scale on the Google toolbar.

Your best bet is to link to sites with more green.

Don’t Use Hidden Text
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. You cannot see these words with the human but search engine spiders can. A spider is the program that Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others use to index web pages, and when they see these invisible words, penalties are likely.

Sometimes the spider will penalize a page by mistake. 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!

Penalties of Cloaking
The final potential risk factor is known as “cloaking.” The page the spider sees is “cloaked” because it is invisible to regular traffic, and deliberately set-up to raise the site’s search engine ranking. A cloaked page tries 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 responded to this kind of deception by imposing steep penalties. The problem 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.

Cloaking of any kind will put your website at great risk. Just as you must be diligent in increasing your link popularity and your ranking, you must be equally diligent to avoid being unfairly penalized. Monitor your site closely and avoid deceptive internet marketing behavior.