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Your Search Ranking Could be at Risk?

Posted on September 20, 2023 by Fred Jensen

Ever since there were search engines, there were techniques that unscrupulous webmasters and shady seo firms purchased to artificially boost rankings. As se's caught to these techniques, they devised methods to detect them with no someone physically look at each site (a practical impossibility, due to the fact several individual engines now index more than a billion pages). Some engines have become more adept at detecting "spam" pages and penalizing or removing them, there's an unfortunate side-effect to the efficiency- some companies which are innocent of intentional wrongdoing unknowingly have sites that belong to the "spam" category. Here are some is a set of a few of the conditions that can hurt such sites, accompanied by suggestions of preventing penalization or removal.

Hidden Text

Almost all se's utilize the words on the pages of internet sites as one element in their ranking equation. Which means that if the written text on your own pages includes your keyphrases, you've got a better potential for ranking highly for all those phrases when compared to a competing page that will not include them. Some webmasters, alert to this however, not wanting their people to actually start to see the text (usually for "aesthetic" reasons), began taking keyphrase-rich text and rendering it exactly the same color because the page background. For instance, in case a page had a white background, they might add text to the page, packed with keyphrases, in exactly the same shade of white.

A human visitor wouldn't normally have the ability to start to see the text, however the internet search engine "spider" (the programs that se's use to venture out and index webpages) would, also it would get yourself a ranking boost accordingly. However, engines soon caught on and began penalizing pages which used this plan. Unfortunately, some innocent sites remain penalized because of this, even though the written text on the pages is seen. Say, for instance, that the backdrop of a full page is white. With this white background is really a large blue box which has white text within it.

Even although text is actually visible to visitors, the internet search engine isn't smart enough to understand that the white text appears in a blue box- it just assumes that the white text has been positioned on a white background. In order to avoid any potential problems, it is necessary that you let your webmaster understand that the text on your own pages shouldn't function as same color because the assigned background color.

Bad Links

Much of the web is founded on sites linking one to the other (search engines itself is actually just a large assortment of links). However, with the relatively recent emphasis placed upon a site's links within the ranking formula (commonly called "link popularity"), it is becoming imperative to carefully select and closely monitor the websites with that you exchange links. Google, the pioneer of the ranking methodology, often penalizes sites offering links from what they call "bad neighborhoods"- sites that Google determines serve no purpose save for artificially boosting link popularity.

It is essential to notice that sites are just penalized if they actively connect to another site, not whenever a site links in their mind (that is only fair, as webmasters haven't any real control over what sites elect to connect to theirs). If any page of one's site contains links to outside sites, it is very important make sure these outside sites aren't being penalized.

Such sites could be penalized, and linking in their mind may get your website penalized subsequently (usually do not, however, avoid exchanging links with sites since they show only a sliver of green- these sites aren't being penalized and links from their website could become more valuable as time passes). Additionally it is essential to monitor the websites that you connect to periodically to ensure that they will have not been penalized because you originally added their connect to your website.

Cloaking

Cloaking, loosely defined, may be the practice of showing search engines spider another page than what a genuine human visitor sees. Which means that the server of a cloaked page makes an email of the initial address assigned to each visitor, so when that visitor is really a spider, it feeds it specialized content that's made to rank highly for several search terms. Just about any major engine now imposes harsh penalties on sites that use cloaking (although those hateful pounds will help you to pay them for the privilege, but that is clearly a topic for another article).

Unfortunately, the intent of cloaking isn't always necessarily to trick se's. Some high-ranking pages are cloaked only to prevent others from stealing the underlying code (such theft is often called "pagejacking"). This concern, however, is somewhat unfounded today. With the increased emphasis of "off the page" elements, such as for example link popularity, an unscrupulous webmaster could steal the code from the high-ranking page and replicate it exactly without reaching the same high rankings. Regardless, the practice of cloaking, for reasons uknown, puts your website vulnerable to being penalized or taken off major engines, so be sure that your webmaster will not employ the technique.

Keyword Stuffing

As mentioned previously, the words on your own pages is definitely an essential aspect in the ranking of one's webpages. However, it really is entirely possible to possess an excessive amount of a very important thing. "Keyphrase Density", since it is often called, may be the ratio of keyphrases on your own page to the entire amount of words on the page. While different engines prefer different keyphrase density, virtually all have an upper limit, and pages could be penalized. Generally, this threshold will be hard to break minus the text sounding inane. However, specially when a keyphrase is section of an organization name, density can accidentally become unnaturally high.

Search engines have become increasingly cognizant of the techniques used to attempt to fool them, plus they are also becoming better at detecting and removing pages that violate their terms of service. It is important to remember that se's make decisions on how best to rank pages based on extensive studies of these users and their preferences, and any webmaster or optimization firm that claims to learn better (and subsequently uses underhanded techniques) does a disservice with their client. Unfortunately, however, sometimes the spam detection methods that the engines use target good sites that inadvertently meet the requirements for removal or penalization. By watching the four issues above, it is possible to help make sure that your site isn't one of these.