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How to Protect Your Website Ranking on Search Engines

Your website’s ranking on search engines is essential to your overall marketing campaign, and there are various ways to improve your page ranking. But there are certain things that you must not do that could have your pages treated as “spam” and get demoted in ranking or could even get completely removed from the search engine’s index.

Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are linked to. Google used these criteria for assigning website ranking, and virtually all search engines on the internet now use it. You must be careful about which sites you choose to link to. Google frequently imposes penalties on sites that have linked to other sites that have been labeled as “bad neighborhoods.”

The fact is that you cannot be penalized when a bad neighborhood links to your site only when you are the one sending out the link to a bad neighborhood. So you must check, and double-check, all the links that are active on your links page to make sure you haven’t linked to a bad neighborhood.

To check out whether or not your pages are linking to bad neighborhood site is by downloading the Google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com. You will then see that most pages are given a “Pagerank” which is represented by a sliding green scale on the Google toolbar.

Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on the scale or when the scale is completely gray. It is more than likely that these pages have been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, you may catch their penalty, like the flu, and it may be difficult to recover from the infection.

There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whose scale shows only a tiny sliver of green on their scale. These sites have not been penalized, and their links may grow in value and popularity. However, you still have to closely monitor these kind of links to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a penalty once you have linked up to them from your links page.

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.

Some webmasters have gotten around this formula by hiding their keywords in such a way 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. Even though you may have the purpose of protecting your keywords from your competitors but as soon as a search engine perceive the use of hidden text - splat! 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 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 utilizing hidden text. To avoid any risk of false penalty, avoid assigning the same color to text as the background color of the page.

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 going overboard in your enthusiasm to please those spiders could results being penalized. 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.

A good rule of thumb is that your keyword should never appear in more than half the sentences on the page. Carefully edit the text on your site so that the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not repeated incessantly.

The final potential risk factor is known as “cloaking”. What this means that 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 responded to this act of deception with extreme enmity, 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.” This kind of shielding is unnecessary these days due to the use of “off page” elements, such as link popularity, that cannot be stolen.

To be on the safe side, there should be absolutely no cloaking and doing so will put your website at great risk.

Just as you must be diligent in increasing your ranking, you must be equally diligent to avoid being unfairly penalized. So be sure to monitor your site closely.

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