Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings

Your website's ranking on search engines is a vital element of your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to improve your link popularity through legitimate methods.

The Internet is populated by bands of dishonest webmasters seeking to boost their link popularity by tweaking and deceiving search engines.

The bright side is that search engines have figured this out, and are now on alert for "spam" pages and sites that have increased their rankings by black hat methods. When search engines locate such a site, that site is relegated in ranking or completely removed from the search engine's index.

The bad news is that some top quality, completely above-board sites are being mistaken for these websites criminals. Your page may be in danger of being caught up in the "spam" net and pitched from a search engine's index, despite the fact that you have done nothing to deserve such harsh treatment.

There are things you can do -- and things you should be sure NOT to do - which will avoid this kind of misperception.

Link popularity 

This is mostly based on the quality of the sites you are linked to. Google started this standard for assigning website ranking, and practically 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 penalizes sites that have linked to other sites solely for the purpose of artificially boosting their link popularity. They have actually labelled these links "bad neighbourhoods."

You can celebrate to the fact that you cannot be penalized when a bad neighbourhood links to your site; penalty happens only when you are the one sending out the link to a bad neighbourhood. 

But you must always check and confirm all the links that are active on your webpage to make sure you haven't linked to a bad neighbourhood.

The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages you have linked to have been penalized. The most direct way is to check is at https://ismywebsitepenalized.com/.

Do not link to any site that is penalized. If you are linked to these pages, you may catch their penalty, and like a virus, it may be difficult to recover from the infection.

However, do make sure that you closely monitor all links that are you linked to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a penalty once you have linked up to them from your links page.

Hidden Text

Another evil trick that illicit webmasters use to unnaturally boost their website popularity is the use of hidden text. Search engines usually use the words on web pages as a factor in forming their rankings, which means that if the text on your page contains your keywords, you have more of an opportunity to increase your search engine ranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive of keywords.

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 colour as the background colour of the page, such as a plethora of white keywords on a white background. 

You cannot see these words with the human eye -- but the eye of 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 goes back and boosts that page's link ranking.

Webmasters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, but search engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as a search engine perceive the use of hidden text - bang! The page is penalized.

The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit overzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. For example, if the background colour of your page is grey, and you have placed grey text inside a black box, the spider will only take note of the grey text and assume you are employing hidden text. 

To avoid any risk of false penalty, simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same colour to text as the background colour of the page -- ever!

Keyword Stuffing

Another potential problem that can result in a penalty is called "keyword stuffing." It is important to have your keywords appear in the text on your page, but sometimes you can go a little overboard in your enthusiasm to please those spiders.

A search engine uses what is called "Keyphrase Density" to determine if a site is trying to artificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio of keywords to the rest of the words on the page. Search engines assign a limit to the number of times you can use a keyword before it decides you have overdone it and penalizes your site.

This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpass without sounding as if you are stuttering -- unless your keyword is part of your company name. If this is the case, it is easy for keyword density to soar. 

So, if your keyword is "surer insurance," be sure you don't use this phrase in every sentence. 

Carefully edit the text on your site so that the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not repeated incessantly.

Cloaking

The final potential risk factor is known as "cloaking. 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 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 reacted to this act of deception with extreme unfriendliness, imposing steep penalties on these sites. 

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’’.

Pagejacking is the process of illegally copying legitimate website content (usually, in the form of source code) to another website designed to replicate the original website.

To be on the safe side, be sure that your webmaster is aware that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make sure the webmaster understands that 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. 

So be sure to monitor your site closely and avoid any appearance of unnaturally boosting your rankings.