|
SE
Tactics: How to Avoid Alienating the
Major Search Engines
Each of the major search engines
Google, Yahoo and MSN have quality
webmaster guidelines in place to
prevent the unfair manipulation of
search engine rankings by
unscrupulous website owners. These
webmaster guidelines change
frequently to 'weed' out any new
deceptive practices and those
websites found engaging in these
illicit practices are consequently
dropped from the search engine
rankings of the major search engine
they have offended.
Being banned or dropped from the
search engine rankings can have dire
effects on your website traffic,
online sales generation and site
popularity. Especially if your
website is classified as a 'bad
neighborhood' site, you can then
kiss your reciprocal linking
campaign goodbye, as existing and
prospective link partners will not
want to be associated with your site
for fear of their own rankings
dropping.
If you wish to avoid alienating the
major search engines then do not
engage in the following SE tactics:
1. 'Cloaking' or sneaky redirects -
displaying different content to the
search engines than shown to your
normal website visitors including
hidden text and hidden links. Often
this is achieved by delivering
content based on the IP address of
the user requesting the page, when a
user is identified as a search
engine spider a side-server script
delivers a different version of the
web page to deceive the search
engine into giving the website a
higher ranking.
2. 'Doorway' pages created
specifically for the search engines
that are aimed at spamming the index
of a search engine by inserting
results for specific keyword phrases
to send the search engine spider to
a different page. With doorway pages
a user doesn't arrive at the page
they were looking for. Similarly
avoid 'cookie cutter' approaches
that direct users to affiliate
advertising with little or no
original content.
3. Don't create pages that install
viruses, Trojans or badware. 'Badware'
is spyware, malware or deceptive
adware that tracks a user's
movements on the internet and
reports this information back to
unscrupulous marketing groups who
then bombard the user with targeted
advertising. This type of spyware is
often unknowingly downloaded when
playing online games or is attached
to software or information downloads
from a site. They are often
difficult to identify and remove
from a user's PC and can affect the
PC's functionality.
4. Avoid using software that sends
automatic programming queries to the
search engines to submit pages or
check rankings. This type of
software consumes valuable computing
resources of the search engines and
you will be penalized for using it.
5. Don't load web pages with
irrelevant words.
6. Don't link to 'bad neighborhood'
sites who have:
* Free for all links pages
* Link farms - automated linking
schemes with lots of unrelated links
* Known web spammers or the site has
been dropped or banned by the search
engines.
7. Avoid 'broken links' or '404
errors', your site will be penalized
for them.
8. Don't display pages with minimal
content that is of little value to
your site visitors.
9. Do not duplicate content
unnecessarily.
10. Do not use pop-ups, pop-unders
or exit consoles.
11. Do not use pages that rely
significantly on links to content
created for another website.
12. Do not use 'cross linking' to
artificially inflate a site's
popularity. For example, the owner
of multiple sites cross linking all
of his sites together, if all sites
are hosted on the same servers the
search engines will pick this up and
the sites will be penalized.
13. Do not misuse a competitors name
or brand names in site content.
14. Sites with numerous, unnecessary
virtual host names will be
penalized.
15. Do not use techniques that
artificially increase the number of
links to your web pages ie. Link
farms.
16. Display web pages with
deceptive, fraudulent content or
pages that provide users with
irrelevant page content.
17. Using content, domain titles,
meta tags and descriptions that
violate any laws, regulations,
infringe on copyrights & trademarks,
trade secrets or intellectual
property rights of an individual or
entity. Specifically in terms of
publicity, privacy, product design,
torts, breach of contract, injury,
damage, consumer fraud, false,
misleading, slanderous or
threatening content.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
About the Author: Rosemary Donald is
an SEO Consultant with Rank1 Website
Marketing
(www.rank1websitemarketing.com) &
author of the SEO ebook 'Insider
Secrets of Rank1 Websites' available
for $29.95 AU. Rosemary is a regular
contributor to online article sites
on the topics of SEO, website
marketing, ecommerce, search engine
marketing & small business
development. Rosemary is also a
successful online trader & owner of
top ranking website .
|