We are all jostling for good positions on the search engines. Consequently there are all sorts of stories and advice about as to what we should and shouldn't do to get good rankings. But a lot of questions are unanswered.For instance: Does exchanging links harm our ranking? What about using keywords - can we use too many?
The difficulty is that there is no definite formula supplied by the various search engines themselves. A lot of what the 'experts' write is purely speculation and guesswork.
What we can do ourselves is read the advice that the search engines do give out.
For example if we look at Google's advice on what they call Link Schemes the following could be detrimental to our search engine ranking:
*Links intended to manipulate PageRank
*Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
*Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")
*Buying or selling links that pass PageRank
Their advice regarding links is simply:
"The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it."If we move on to the Yahoo Search Content Quality Guidelines they don't like:
*Sites cross-linked excessively with other sites to inflate a site's apparent popularity (link schemes)
*Pages built primarily for the search engines or pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords
And as for Windows, and their Live.com search engine, within their Guidelines For Successful Indexing they list the following things to avoid:
*Attempting to increase a webpage's keyword density by add lots of irrelevant words.
*This includes stuffing ALT tags that users are unlikely to view.
*Using hidden text or links. Only use text and links that are visible to users.
*Using techniques, such as link farms, to artificially increase the number of links to your webpage.
It's all very complicated but the message clearly is that we need genuine links. It's not necessarily the number that's important but the quality of the links. Plus we need good content.
It's worth reading what the search engines are telling us and hopefully our search engine rankings won't be penalised.
It's so easy for SE referrals to take a dive and not really know what we've done wrong. It's a matter of trying to read what is being said by the search engine's 'between the lines.'
Good luck,
Mike
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