Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings (Part 1)

Your website's ranking on search engines is an important
factor of your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways
to enhance your link popularity through legal methods.
Unfortunately, the Internet is populated by bands of
untruthful webmasters seeking to improve their link
popularity by feigning out search engines.

The good news is that search engines have figured this out,
and are now on alert for "spam" pages and sites that have
increased their rankings by bogus methods. When a
search engines tracks down such a site, that site is
downgraded in ranking or entirely removed from the search
engine's index.

The bad news is that some high quality, completely
above-board sites are being confused for these web page
criminals. Your page may be in danger of being caught up in
the "spam" net and tossed from a search engine's index.
However, there are things you can do and not do, which can
prevent this kind of misperception.

Link popularity is generally based on the quality of sites you
are linked to. Google invented this criteria for assigning
website ranking, and practically all search engines on the
Internet now use it. There are legitimate ways to undertake
increasing your link popularity, but at the same time, you
must be exactly careful about which sites you choose
to link to. Google often dictate penalties on sites
that have linked to other sites entirely for the purpose of
artificially increasing their link popularity. They have
actually labeled these links as "bad neighborhoods."

You can rest assure that you cannot be penalized when
a "bad neighbourhood" link to your site, penalty happens only
when are the one sending out the link to a bad neighbourhood.
However, you have to double check all the links that are active
on your links page to ensure that you haven't linked to a bad
neighbourhood.

The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages
you have linked to have been penalized. The most straightforward
way to do this is to download the Google toolbar at
http://toolbar.google.com. You will then see that most pages are
given a "Pagerank" which is depicted by a sliding green scale on
the Google toolbar.

Do not link to any site that exhibits no green at all on the
scale. This is particulary important when the scale is
completely gray. It is more than likely that these pages
have been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, you
may catch their penalty and it may be hard to recover from the
situation.

There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whose
scale exhibits only a very small sliver of green on their scale.
These sites have not been penalized, and their links may
grow in popularity and value. However, do ensure that
you carefully monitor these kind of links to make sure that
at some point they do not favor a penalty once you have
linked up to them from your links page.