Are Your Search Engine Rankings At Risk? 
Issues That Can Get Well-Intentioned Sites Penalized 
by Scott Buresh

Ever since there have been search engines, there have been
techniques that unscrupulous webmasters and shady search engine 
optimization firms have used to artificially boost rankings. As 
search engines caught on to these techniques, they devised ways 
to detect them without having someone physically look at each 
site (a practical impossibility, considering that several 
individual engines now index well over a billion pages). 

While most engines are becoming more adept at detecting "spam" 
pages and penalizing or removing them, there is an unfortunate 
side effect to this efficiency - some companies that are innocent 
of intentional wrongdoing unknowingly have sites that fall into 
the "spam" category. What follows is a list of some of the issues 
that can hurt such sites, followed by suggestions of how to 
prevent penalization or removal.

Issue #1: Bad Links

Much of the internet is founded on sites linking to one another 
(a search engine itself is really just a very large collection 
of links). However, with the relatively recent emphasis placed 
upon a site's links as part of the ranking formula (commonly 
called "link popularity"), it has become crucial to carefully 
select and closely monitor the sites with which you exchange 
links. 

Google, the pioneer of this ranking methodology, often penalizes 
sites that provide links to what they call "bad neighborhoods"- 
sites that Google determines serve no purpose save for 
artificially boosting link popularity. It is important to note 
that sites are only penalized when they actively link to another 
site, not when a site links to them (which is only fair, as 
webmasters have no real control over what sites choose to link 
to theirs). 

If any page of your site contains links to outside sites, it is
important to make certain that these outside sites are not being 
penalized. The easiest way to do this on Google is to download 
the Google toolbar (available at http://toolbar.google.com/).
 
Most pages that you find on the internet have been assigned a 
"Pagerank", which is represented by a sliding green scale on the 
toolbar (visit the link to see an example). To be safe, avoid 
linking to any site that does not show any green on this scale 
(most importantly when this scale is grayed out). Such sites may 
be penalized, and linking to them may get your site penalized in 
turn (do not, however, refrain from exchanging links with sites 
simply because they show just a sliver of green- these sites are 
not being penalized and links from them may become more valuable 
over time). It is also very important to monitor the sites that 
you link to periodically to make certain that they have not been
penalized since you originally added their link to your site.

Issue #2: Hidden Text

Almost all search engines use the words on the pages of web 
sites as one factor in their ranking equation. This means that
if the text on your pages includes your keyphrases, you have a
better chance of ranking highly for those phrases than a
competing page that does not include them. 

Some webmasters, aware of this but not wanting their visitors to 
actually see the text (usually for "aesthetic" reasons), began 
taking keyphrase-rich text and making it the same color as the 
page background. For example, if a page had a white background,
they would add text to the page, loaded with keyphrases, in the 
same shade of white. A human visitor would not be able to see 
the text, but the search engine "spider" (the programs that 
search engines use to go out and index web pages) would, and it 
would get a ranking boost accordingly. 

However, engines soon caught on and began penalizing pages that 
used this tactic. Unfortunately, some innocent sites are still 
penalized for this, even though the text on their pages is 
visible. Say, for example, that the background of a page is 
white. On this white background is a large blue box that has 
white text within it. Even though the text is clearly visible 
to the visitor, the search engine is not smart enough to realize 
that the white text appears in a blue box- it just assumes that 
the white text has been placed on a white background. To avoid 
any potential problems, it is important that you let your
webmaster know that the text on your pages should never be the
same color as the assigned background color.

Issue #3: Keyword Stuffing

As mentioned above, the words on your pages can be an important 
factor in the ranking of your web pages. However, it is entirely 
possible to have too much of a good thing.

"Keyphrase Density", as it is commonly called, is the ratio of
keyphrases on your page to the overall number of words on the
page. While different engines prefer different keyphrase 
density, almost all have an upper limit, after which pages can 
be penalized. In most cases, this threshold would be hard to
break without the text sounding inane. However, particularly
when a keyphrase is part of a company name, density can
accidentally become unnaturally high. For example, if your
company name was "Atlanta Plumbing Pros" and you styled your
text so that this company name was used in almost every sentence, 
you would have a dangerously high density for the phrase "Atlanta 
Plumbing" and would be at risk of penalization. 

To correct any potential problems, go over the text on each of 
your pages and make certain that it reads naturally and that no 
phrases are repeated too frequently (for example in more than 
half of the sentences).

Issue #4: Cloaking

Cloaking, loosely defined, is the practice of showing a search
engine spider a different page than what an actual human visitor 
sees. This means that the server of a cloaked page makes a note 
of the unique address assigned to each visitor, and when that 
visitor is a spider, it feeds it specialized content that is 
designed to rank highly for certain search terms. 

Virtually every major engine now imposes harsh penalties on 
sites that use cloaking (although a few of them will allow you 
to pay them for the privilege, but that's a topic for a future 
article). 

Unfortunately, the intent of cloaking isn't always necessarily 
to trick search engines. Some high-ranking pages are cloaked 
simply to prevent others from stealing the underlying code 
(such theft is commonly called "pagejacking"). This concern, 
however, is somewhat unfounded today. With the increased 
emphasis of "off the page" elements, such as link popularity, 
an unscrupulous webmaster could steal the code from a 
high-ranking page and replicate it exactly without achieving 
the same high rankings. 

In any case, the practice of cloaking, for whatever reason, 
puts your site at risk of being penalized or removed from 
major engines, so make sure that your webmaster does not employ 
the technique.

Conclusion

Search engines are becoming increasingly cognizant of the
techniques used to try to fool them, and they are also
becoming better at detecting and removing pages that violate
their terms of service. 

It's important to remember that search engines make decisions 
on how to rank pages based upon extensive studies of their users 
and their preferences, and any webmaster or optimization firm 
that claims to know better (and subsequently uses underhanded 
techniques) is doing a disservice to their client. Unfortunately, 
however, sometimes the spam detection methods that the engines 
use target good sites that inadvertently meet the criteria for 
removal or penalization. By paying attention to the four issues 
above, you can help ensure that your site isn't one of them.


================================================================
Scott Buresh is Co-founder and Principal of Medium Blue Internet 
Marketing (http://www.mediumblue.com). For monthly tips on how 
to get the most out of your internet presence, sign up for our 
Internet Marketing Newsletter (http://www.mediumblue.com/newsletters)
================================================================