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Questionable Practices to be Aware of

There are certain practices that search engines do frown upon – to the extent that they may even ban websites that apply them. Sometimes you may see them in websites that the search engines (SE) haven’t noticed yet (although this is getting rarer as the engine’s algorithms become more sophisticated).

Unfortunately there are still some ‘website optimisers’ and businesses that recommend them, here are the major ones to watch out for.

Firstly, do not be over zealous in the application of your keywords on your page. Cramming too many keywords on to a page, or too close together in unnatural ways sets off the spam-detectors21 of the search engines. – Especially if you’re attempting to do this

(a) with ‘tiny-text’, using the smallest font setting available or

(b) with ‘invisible text’ which is so close to the background colour so as to be virtually unnoticeable… The bottom-line is that search engines strive to assign relevancy based on the content that is actually visible to a user. Attempts to fool or misdirect it in this regards may have negative consequences.

(c) Also, a practice, now long considered to be poor form, is to stuff keywords into hidden page tags (such as Meta tags)... so don't do it.

Secondly, choose you incoming links carefully. Make sure the sites linking to you are reputable (ie. That they aren’t spamming the search engines).

Also, be weary of submitting your site to large ‘link-farm’ networks. So called ‘link-farms’ are sites or groups of sites designed simply to provide external links in an attempt to improve search rankings. The engines are becoming very aware of (and disapproving of) this sort of tactic and may actually penalise your ranking because of it.

Basically, SEs are wanting to ensure that what they have in their index, does actually match the content that a human user will see. Therefore the tend to consider anything that cause a disparity in this regard as possibly being suspect. So be very careful an weigh up the possible consequences if your are planning to use any techniques that alter what the search engines see, without a similar change in what a human user would see. Sometimes all it may take is for one of your competition to lodge a complaint against you for using some arguably tricky technique, and you may find yourself penalised.

One more point to bear in mind, is to be judicious in how you set up websites that are design to direct people back to a main site. If a site simply has a redirect instruction on it, often that site won’t get counted at all. Instead, only the destination site will.

ALSO SEE >> About Doorway, Hallway or Pointer Pages

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SEM Advantage (SPS Group Pty Ltd)

Suite 207, 410 Elizabeth Street,

Surry Hills, NSW 2010, Australia

p 61 2 9280 0010

f  61 2 9280 0081

e simon@iedsolutions.com.au

Copyright (C) 2003 SPS Group Pty Ltd. No Reproduction permitted