Monday, January 10, 2005

Avoid Search Engine Blacklisting

Within the last few years, every Webmaster seems to be in the race of optimizing its website for the search engines by using techniques hook or by crook. Some of these techniques have been able to give an instant good ranking at the search engines result and have been used by many webmasters time and again. Keeping that fact in mind, most of the search engines have now formed ways in order to blacklist all such websites who have been using techniques to gain high rankings at the search engines.

With Google currently gaining a much stronger position in the list of search engines, it has started penalizing and blacklisting all such websites who have been using such techniques in order to cheat crawlers to gain higher rankings. Getting blacklisted from Google means getting blacklisted from 60-70% of the people using search engines, as Google has been the market leader in search engines. Once penalized you will have a fortune in getting your website back to the search engines. So, here are the few techniques that can be avoided in doing quick search engine optimization.

Mirror Websites
Once been a popular method in getting quick high ranking at search engines, mirror websites are basically websites that have the same content but different urls. But with the intelligence and growth of smart search engines, this method can only result in blacklisting your website forever.

Doorway (gateway) Pages
This method is used to rank high in the search engine results by using pages which don’t exist for the visitors. These Doorway pages have very less real content for the visitors and are hence are hidden for them. These are only used in order to make the search engines rank the websites high because of the presence of specific keywords or content. Google has been very strict in finding out the use of such gateway pages and is penalizing the websites by not indexing them in its results.

Invisible Text and Graphics
Invisible Text is a method again utilized by most of the webmasters in hiding the information from the eyes of the visitors by making it invisible by using very similar color to the background. In this way, the crawlers would find the specific keywords and phrases been repeated again and again and would rank the website higher in the results. This method is also used to link doorway pages and hidden site maps.

Submitting Pages Too Often
Most of the Webmasters have an assumption that submitting their WebPages again and again would rank them higher in the search engine results but that is not exactly the case. Every search engine has defined certain submission rules and they enforce it very strictly; submitting the same pages to the search engines again and again before their set duration can get you penalized.

Using Irrelevant Keywords
Some websites cheat search engines by using irrelevant keywords in Meta tags and body just in order to achieve high rankings. Search engines thus have utilized a policy to only list such websites that have these Meta tags relevancy with the content that is been used in that page. If the content and the keywords don’t match you may be penalized for spamming the search engine.

Automated Submission Software
There are scores of automated submission software available in the market right now that claim to get your website submitted to scores of search engines in a few minutes. But recently enough, most of the search engines have started taking this practice as spamming and don’t index the websites that have been submitted with such practice. They like the submissions to be done manually so as to avoid the automated spammed submissions.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the latest craze to hit the internet and the webmasters who want to increase a targeted traffic to their website in a disciplined manner by positioning high in the search results of most used search engines for various keywords or related search terms.

SEO is all about positioning high in the search engine against some key words or related search terms; the higher the position the higher is the chance that people will visit the website. A survey on the search engines revealed that most of the visitors only visit the relevant keywords results and sites in the first three pages of the search engines. So, if you want your website to be have a targeted/focused traffic visitors then you need to be in the search results of the search engines in the first three pages as there are only few visitors who actually click through pages and pages of search results. Hence, your site positioning in the search engine against relevant keywords is very much essential for directing more traffic toward the website.

Why is it Necessary?
There is no doubt about the very fact that internet is growing leaps and bounds in the last few years and the number of people using Internet is growing day by day. Search engines are one of the major sources of people’s information as most of them use search engines to find relevant resources against set keywords.

Hence, to make it possible for the visitors and net users to come to your site and get relevant information, you need to make your website search engine optimized so that it may get top position on those same search engines that hundreds of millions people are using daily. It is not necessary that your website get featured in the top three pages at the relevant keywords that you are using. The reason is simply that there are hundreds of websites all over the world and your website may be ranked lower than other websites.

Search engine Optimization within the last few years has been the hottest topic of the Internet and why not it should be. Keeping in view the tremendous growth of internet in mind, there is no novelty that every webmaster wants to get a top slot in the search engine results against the relevant keywords. The passion and the quest to get the top slot in the race of search engines is never ending and hence SEO experts are minting money in optimizing websites for the webmasters and companies. But this effort is paying as well for those individual or company who is thinking of marketing their products or services, as the Internet is virtually limitless gold mine of potential customers.

The science behind SEO
Search engine optimization in technical terms is ‘a process of configuring any website for maximum exposure to the search engine spiders to ensure relevant placement within the search engine's database structure and results’.

Hence, technically speaking, the major idea behind the technical jargon of SEO is to make the search of the net users as easy as possible so that they can find relevant information in a easy manner. In other words, the process of SEO is actually to prepare and promote a website so that it gets featured against the relevant keywords on the search engine. The process of SEO thus makes at one place the quest to webmasters to get featured against relevant keywords as well as on the other hand make the net users provide most relevant/appropriate content to what they are searching for.

Most of the webmasters have a misconception that making their website SEO once they have done all for life time. But in reality it is not so, as Search engine optimization is an ongoing process. Search engines are developing and growing day by day and hence they are also changing their rules. It is possible that your website may be featured at the top slot this month against relevant keywords but may not be after few months. SEO is growing day by day and hence webmasters need to grow along with that as in any given time there are numerous things that the search engines look for that you need to be conscious of and plan for.