Search Engine Spam: Useful Knowledge for the Web Site PromoterWritten by David Gikandi
Before getting started on using gateway pages and other HTML techniques to improve your search engine ranking, you need to know a little about spam and spamdexing. Spamming search engines (or spamdexing) is practice of using unethical or unprofessional techniques to try to improve search engine rankings. You should be aware of what constitutes spamming so as to avoid trouble with search engines. For example, if you have a page with a white background, and you have a table that has a blue background and white text in it, you are actually spamming Infoseek engine without even knowing it! Infoseek will see white text and see a white page background, concluding that your background color and your page color are same so you are spamming! It will not be able to tell that white text is actually within a blue table and is perfectly legible. It is silly, but that will cause that page to be dropped off index. You can get it back on by changing text color in table to, say, a light gray and resubmitting page to Infoseek. See what a difference that makes? Yet you had no idea that your page was considered spam! Generally, it is very easy to know what not to do so as to avoid being labeled a spammer and having your pages or your site penalized. By following a few simple rules, you can safely improve your search engine rankings without unknowingly spamming engines and getting penalized for it.What constitutes spam? Some techniques are clearly considered as an attempt to spam engines. Where possible, you should avoid these: Keyword stuffing. This is repeated use of a word to increase its frequency on a page. Search engines now have ability to analyze a page and determine whether frequency is above a "normal" level in proportion to rest of words in document. Invisible text. Some webmasters stuff keywords at bottom of a page and make their text color same as that of page background. This is also detectable by engines. Tiny text. Same as invisible text but with tiny, illegible text. Page redirects. Some engines, especially Infoseek, do not like pages that take user to another page without his or her intervention, e.g. using META refresh tags, cgi scripts, Java, JavaScript, or server side techniques. Meta tags stuffing. Do not repeat your keywords in Meta tags more than once, and do not use keywords that are unrelated to your site's content. Never use keywords that do not apply to your site's content. Do not create too many doorways with very similar keywords. Do not submit same page more than once on same day to same search engine. Do not submit virtually identical pages, i.e. do not simply duplicate a web page, give copies different file names, and submit them all. That will be interpreted as an attempt to flood engine. Code swapping. Do not optimize a page for top ranking, then swap another page in its place once a top ranking is achieved. Do not submit doorways to submission directories like Yahoo! Do not submit more than allowed number of pages per engine per day or week. Each engine has a limit on how many pages you can manually submit to it using its online forms. Currently these are limits: AltaVista 1-10 pages per day; HotBot 50 pages per day; Excite 25 pages per week; Infoseek 50 pages per day but unlimited when using e-mail submissions. Please note that this is not total number of pages that can be indexed, it is just total number that can be submitted. If you can only submit 25 pages to Excite, for example, and you have a 1000 page site, that's no problem. The search engine will come crawling your site and index all pages, including those that you did not submit. Gray Areas There are certain practices that can be considered spam by search engine when they are actually just part of honest web site design. For example, Infoseek does not index any page with a fast page refresh. Yet, refresh tags are commonly used by web site designers to produce visual effects or to take people to a new location of a page that has been moved. Also, some engines look at text color and background color and if they match, that page is considered spam. But you could have a page with a white background and a black table somewhere with white text in it. Although perfectly legible and legitimate, that page will be ignored by some engines. Another example is that Infoseek advises against (but does not seem to drop from index) having many pages with links to one page. Even though this is meant to discourage spammers, it also places many legitimate webmasters in spam region (almost anyone with a large web site or a web site with an online forum always has their pages linking back to home page). These are just a few examples of gray areas in this business. Fortunately, because search engine people know that they exist, they will not penalize your entire site just because of them.
| | How to Get Top Search Engine PositioningWritten by David Gikandi
There is a pervasive myth among web site managers that simply submitting your web site to hundreds of search engines will increase traffic to your site. Another myth is that simply inserting META tags in your Web pages will also increase your traffic. Both are just not true. So what works? Search engine positioning. That is by far your best and most affordable bet.Consider these statistics: Over 95% of Web users find what they are looking for by visiting top 6 search engines. Yahoo alone handled over 55 million searches and page views in December 1997. Many of these searches are for products and services that you deal in, guaranteed! Everybody knows that even a few good positions on even one or two important keywords or phrases can drive thousands or hundreds of thousands of quality visitor traffic to a Web site per day. Research has shown that people hardly ever go past top 30 search results for any one search. The top 10 results receive 78% more traffic than those in position 11 to 30 do. The top 30 results get over 90% of search traffic. This alone explains why some sites do so well and others so disappointingly, and why it is so critical to be ranked highly. So how do you position your web site at top of search engine results? Use doorway pages. Doorway pages, also known as entry or bridge pages, are Web pages designed specifically to rank highly on unique ranking algorithms of each search engine. The two best things about using doorway pages is that they cost far less than other promotional tools such as banner ads, and they work better when properly designed. There are two ways to go about creating doorways. You can either do it yourself or have someone do it for you. If you decide to do it yourself, be prepared to invest a considerable amount of time on them - beating search engine algorithms is not an easy matter! You should also be prepared to make a number of doorway pages. You must make one doorway page per keyword or keyword phrase that you want to be positioned well in. For best results, depending on your sites subject matter, you should target 10 to 50 keywords and keyword phrases. Usually, a page that ranks well on one engine may not rank well on other engines. Assuming that you want to make sure that you are ranked highly on five top engines (AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos, Infoseek and Excite Yahoo does not accept doorway pages), you have to make five versions of each doorway page, each optimized for a particular engine. Knowing what it takes to make effective doorway pages is not hard there are lots of good publications that now tell you exactly what search engines are looking for in a page that will rank highly. One of best guides to this is "Secrets to Achieving a Top 10 Position", a free 118 page manual that comes free with WebPosition software (see www.searchpositioning.com for details). The hard part is in actually creating these doorways! Basically, this is what it would involve: First, you have to realize that ranking criteria varies from search engine to search engine. Most evaluate placement of keywords or keyword phrases on various parts of your pages based simultaneously on all these criteria: Prominence of keyword searched how early in a page a keyword appears. Frequency of keyword searched number of times keyword appears. Be careful about this. Simply repeating keyword will not work because grammatical structure and keyword weight also plays a role. Site Popularity a few search engines consider how popular your site is when ranking. "Weight" of keywords that is ratio of keywords to all other words. Each search engine has a threshold. If your page crosses that threshold, engine labels it as spam and ignores it. Proximity of keywords how close together keywords are to each other, especially when item searched for is a phrase. Keyword Placement these are locations where an engine will look for keyword, e.g. in body, title, META tags, etc. Grammatical structure some engines consider grammar in their calculations. They do this to make it harder for spammers to do their thing. Synonyms some engines look for words similar in meaning to keyword. As you can see, ranking criteria is highly dynamic, using a complex algorithm that integrates all above factors in various proportions and with various maximum and minimum values. An important criteria to look deeper into is keyword placement criteria. These are various places that engines look for keywords:
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