By : Nidhi Gupta

Yahoo’s Search Engine Penalties

Yahoo has many penalties, but their systems are much more enigmatic than Google’s. Some penalties are fair, while many people complain in the forums about receiving unfair penalties with Yahoo.

Yahoo has a very strict spam control department, thus they have many penalties that are applied automatically and many others that are manual.

The main difference between Yahoo and Google is that penalties in Google are automatically removed, while removing penalties in Yahoo is very difficult and can only be accomplished manually, by requesting that Yahoo remove the penalty via email.

In Yahoo’s guidelines pages for webmasters, the following is considered spam:

• Pages that harm accuracy, diversity or relevance of search results

• Pages dedicated to directing the user to another page

• Pages that have substantially the same content as other pages

• Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames

• Lots of pages that were automatically generated or of little value

• Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking

• The use of text that is hidden from the user

• Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end-user sees

• Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site’s apparent popularity

• Pages built primarily for the search engines

• Misuse of competitor names

• Multiple sites offering the same content

• Pages that use excessive pop-ups, interfering with user navigation

• Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent or provide a poor user experience

Other Yahoo Penalties:

• Acquiring too many inbound links too quickly

• Setting up sites especially to boost link popularity for other sites

• Multiple domains owned and promoted by one company

• Linking to other sites using a 302 redirect

• CGI scripted links that pointed from other sites to your site, fooling Yahoo’s robot’s into believing your site has duplicate content

• High anchor density due to scraper sites using similar anchor text, which is the title of the site found in the
  engines

MSN Search Engine Penalties

MSN has the fewest penalties of any search engine. Currently, they are applying only basic spam checking filters and consequently, penalties are few and spam abundant.

MSN describes the following as undesirable:

The following items and techniques are not appropriate uses of the index:

• Use of these items and techniques may affect how your site is ranked within MSN Search and may result in the removal of your site from the MSN Search index.

• Loading pages with irrelevant words in an attempt to increase a page’s keyword density. This includes stuffing ALT tags that users are unlikely to view

• Using hidden text or links. You should use only text and links that are visible to users

• Using techniques to artificially increase the number of links to your page, such as link farms

Conclusion

To ensure that your site performs well and ranks consistently, consider the brick and mortar analogy. Treat your site like your store. Study what works, and build on it. Announce your site without engaging in “illegal” practices. As you’re working on your site, think “If Sergey Brin reviewed my site, would he approve of it?” This will help you to establish and maintain a successful site.

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By : Admin

After creating a wonderful website by hiring an expensive web designer, many webmasters spends sleepless nights. Reason? Their web site is not showing up in the search engines like Google, MSN or Yahoo! They think for hours, what has gone wrong after putting in so lot of time, money and efforts? The answer is spiders are having difficulty in “crawling” or reading the website. But what these spiders are? Spiders are the automated robots or “bots” that crawl the web looking for new and updated webpages. They sometimes find problem crawling a website and there are many possible factors that lead to this problem. Some of them are mentioned below.

Flash: Flash is a technology that designers and programmers use to add animation and sound to a site. When used properly, it adds excitement and energy to a site. Many people consider static, text-heavy sites boring, and with today’s high-speed connections, they expect sites to have a bit of flair to them.

However, the problem is when an entire site is built using one large Flash file. Spiders can’t read the text embedded in the Flash file making it difficult for the site to rank well in search engines. Flash sites also lack individual pages that can be optimized.

Graphic Files: Spiders crawl your site’s HTML source code looking for text. For your site to be indexed and ranked by the search engines, the spider has to find and read the page copy in the HTML source code. Spiders can’t read words embedded in common graphic files, such as GIFs or JPEGs. If your site’s homepage is one large graphic file, you’re blocking the spider from reading the copy your visitors see. Your site will show up for your company name but not much else.

Homepage is a form: If you require site visitors to choose an item from a drop down menu, for example, they have to choose a country or language before entering your site; you’re effectively stopping spiders cold. Why? Spiders can’t manipulate drop-down menus. A good work-around is to include static text links on your page as well. Because spiders can read text links, including them will help the spider find the subpages of your site.

Homepage is a splash page: Splash pages are fancy animated intros and are problematic for spiders and for people. Most splash pages contain a redirect after the Flash animation is complete. All search engines consider redirects to be spam. Also, many site visitors don’t like sitting through the music and visuals of Flash intros either because they waste time. Instead, they’ll click right back out!

Text: Not having text on a page is a problem for two reasons: One, the spider has nothing to read and index, and two, your prospects and customers have no idea what you’re offering. Simply put, no text means lower search engine rankings, conversions, and sales. Consider including 100-300 words of keyword-rich, text-based copy on each page of your site.

To conclude, make your website as spider friendly as possible. Building a spider-friendly site is crucial to search engine visibility. Ensure that your home page and subpages have text-based copy, don’t rely only on drop-down menus, and limit the use of Flash in order to acquire a high ranking and indexing with major search engines.

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By : Nidhi Gupta

Not only do you have just a few seconds to grab the attention of the web visitor, but before that your site must be “found” when web surfers search on related keywords or phrases. Decent traffic will result if a website ranks well in search engines that are why strong placement in search engines for critical keywords and phrases is essential.

Search Engine Optimization Do’s:

1. CSS - Cascading Style Sheets. Use header tags and cascading style sheets in your website design. Many search engines value H1 and H2 tags more than others. The assumption is that header tags are used to highlight the most important items or themes that appear on a page. By using header tags, webmasters can bullet those keywords or phrases they deem to be most important. The CSS file will help your site load quickly and provide a consistent look and feel throughout the website.

2. Titles. A website is the collection of webpages under a single domain. A webpage refers to a specific page within a website. Unique page titles throughout a website is important. Websites typically contain many webpages and using unique titles on webpages will help highlight different key phrases while uniting all the website content in a single theme.

3. Related Links. Links from related or relevant sites are more important than generic links from unrelated websites. Links are seen as “votes” of quality content. Search engines weigh links from websites that contain related or similar content more importantly, than links from unrelated websites. Work to obtain relevant quality links from related or authority websites.

4. Anchor Text. Vary anchor text. Use a variety of phrases to link to a site. Using different anchor text to link to a website is seen by search engines as “natural” linking. Search engines use the anchor text of a websites incoming link as part of their algorithm to determine a websites theme.

5. Copy. A minimum of 200 words of copy is suggested for each web page. In order to spider a site a search engine must have sufficient copy to spider. Less does not necessarily mean more, when it comes to search engine ranking. In general try to keep copy “above the fold”, so that visitors don’t have to scroll. Copy above the fold is usually sufficient to determine the context of the webpage.

6. Fresh. Keep it fresh. Search engines take notice of how frequently content is updated or added. Search engines spider websites that update content on a frequent basis at regular intervals. Add new content or webpages daily or weekly to increase a search engine spider’s frequency.

7. Consistent. Provide quality, consistent, fresh content. Consistent related content is critical to encouraging both visitors and search engines to return. Providing consistent quality content encourages links which will increase a websites popularity.

8. Themed. Relate the contents of a website by a single theme. Uniting content using contextual words will help websites rank well for less critical but very targeted related keywords and phrases.

Search Engine Optimization Don’ts

1. Keyword Stuffing. Don’t stuff web pages with keywords that is similar to or the same as the webpage’s background color. Most search engines have ways to detect keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing will likely result in a search engine ban.

2. Cloaking. Cloaking is when the website identifies the IP address of a search engine spider and feeds the spider content that it is not really on the page. Essentially the search engine sees optimized content that is not currently on the web page that it is spidered. It is difficult for search engines to detect cloaking, but if a site is banned or cloaking it is very difficult to convince a search engine to relist the content.

3. Don’t Sacrifice Quality. Don’t sacrifice quality for optimization. While search engine optimization is important, it is equally important that the content on a webpage should make sense. Placing well in search engines at the expense of a quality professional image with decent web copy, will not usually result in sales. It is a matter of striking a balance.

4. Spam. Not much to be said about this one, don’t spam. Don’t spam search engines, don’t conduct email spam campaigns, and don’t spam forums. Being labeled a spammer is a hard reputation to shed.

A website is an important part of a business; search engine optimization is a business investment and requires attention and effort in order to succeed. Website creation is more than just pretty images and an attractive design. In order to “sell” your product or service your information, your site must be found. Therefore it is imperative that search engine content is optimized for search engine placement.

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