LSI and Link PopularityWritten by Andy Hagans
When Paypal's official Web site no longer ranked #1 in Google on a search for "paypal," it was obvious that Google had become more aggressive in penalizing sites with "unnatural" backlink anchor text. Although high-profile Paypal example has since been rectified, thousands of webmasters are suffering consequences of not ranking for even their official company name, let alone their top keywords. It is important for search engine optimizers to understand both how anchor text penalties are being applied and how LSI ensures that anchor text variance will not dilute a link popularity building campaign.Anchor Text Penalties In past year, webmasters have found that aggressive link popularity building tactics that work well in search engines such as Yahoo! do not fare well in Google. Google has implemented several features to filter out sites that appear to have an unnatural backlink structure; one of these features seems to be specifically penalizing sites with unnatural backlink anchor text. It has always been an SEO best practice to use descriptive anchor text in both external and internal links. But search engine optimizers have often focused on a single keyword phrase when choosing anchor text, especially if their topic has one keyword that receives vastly more traffic than any secondary keywords. Since good links are hard to come by, they do not want to "waste" any of those backlinks with anchor text that does not contain their main keyword. The drawback to this approach is that it can be interpreted as unnatural by a search engine. A site with organic, passively-obtained backlinks will have a wide variety of backlink anchor text variations such as: "official site title," "keyword," "keyword synonym," "www.thesite.com" and even "click here." If vast majority of a site's backlink anchor text is simply "keyword," it is obvious to an algorithm that link popularity was not obtained organically. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Basics Let's now touch upon myth I mentioned before, that if a backlink's anchor text does not contain your Web site's main keyword, its power is wasted. The concept of latent semantic indexing, which may be more fully implemented by major search engines in near future, will prove this myth to be false.
| | The Sandbox EffectWritten by Matt Colyer
What once many people thought they had a penalty, is now being called Sandbox Effect and is causing new web sites not to rank very well in search results of Google, not even for least competitive phrases. Meaning that a filter is being placed on new web sites and cannot rank very high for most words or phrases for a certain amount of time.This does not mean it's punishment for anything webmaster did with their site, such as using Spam or anything like that. The probation likely don't apply to web site, but instead to backlinks. After link stays on web site for a certain amount of time it will no longer be on probation and fully counted as a backlink to your web site. Even if your site is better than your competitors it will still be in Sandbox. There is a lot of debate as to why Google uses sandbox filter. However, It is believed that this is attempt by Google to discourage web site owners that use SEO Spam techniques to rank high fast and make a quick buck before Google discovers they are using Spam. This is largely because Google uses link popularity so much to rank web sites in it's search engine.
|
