Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings (Part 2)

Another immoral trick that illicit webmasters use to
unnaturally increase their link popularity is the use of
hidden text. Search engines usually use the words on web
pages as an element in building their rankings, which means
that if the text on your page contains your keywords, you
have more of an opportunity to boost your search engine
ranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive of
keywords.

Some webmasters have evade from this formula by concealing
their keywords in such a way so that they are not visible to
any visitors to their site. An example, they have used the keywords
but blended them the same colour as the page's background colour such
as an excess of white keywords on a white background. You won't be able
to see these words with the human eye, however a search engine spider
can spot them easily. A spider is the program search engines use to
index web pages, and when it spots these invisible words, it
goes back and boosts that page's link ranking.

Webmasters may be very intelligent and sometimes dishonest, but
search engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as a search
engine see the use of hidden text, the page will be penalized.
The drawback of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit
overzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. For
example, if the background color of your page is blue, and
you have placed blue text inside a black box, the spider
will only take note of the blue text and believe you are
making use of hidden text. To refrain from any risk of false penalty,
simply direct your webmaster not to select the same color
to text as the background color of the page - ever!

There is another possible problem that can result in a penalty is
called "keyword stuffing." It is vital to have your
keywords present in the text on your page, but sometimes you
can go a little overdone in your enthusiasm to please
those spiders. A search engine uses what is called
"Keyphrase Density" to conclude if a site is trying to
artificially increase their ranking. This is the ratio of
keywords to the rest of the words on the page. Search
engines appoint a limit to the number of times you can use a
keyword before it decides you have overdone it and
penalizes your site.

This ratio is quite high, so it is very hard to surpass
unless your keyword is part of your company name. If this is
the case, it is easy for keyword mass to soar. So, if your
keyword is "renters insurance," make sure that you don't use
this phrase in every sentence. Cautiously edit the text on your site
so that the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not
repeated incessantly. A good rule of thumb is your keyword
should never appear in more than half the sentences on the
page.

The final possible risk factor is known as "cloaking."
Cloaking is when the server delivers a visitor to one page and
a search engine spider to a different page. The page the spider sees
is "cloaked" because it is not visible to regular traffic,
and intentionally set-up to increase the site's search engine
ranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everything
it needs to escalate that page's ranking to the top of the
list.

It is normal that search engines have responded to this
act of deception with utmost animosity, imposing steep
penalties on these sites. The problem on your end is that
sometimes pages are cloaked for legal reasons, such as
prevention against the theft of code, often referred to as
"pagejacking." However, such guarding is unnecessary nowadays
due to the use of " off page" elements, like link popularity,
that cannot be stolen.

To be on the safe side, make sure that your webmaster is
alert that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make sure
the webmaster recgonizes that cloaking of any kind will
put your website at great risk.

Just as you must be hard-working in increasing your ranking
and your link popularity, you must be equally diligent
to avoid being unjustly penalized. So be sure to monitor
your site closely and avoid any emergence of artificially
boosting your rankings.