How Not to Optimize Your Site's Ranking

Now that you know the things you can do to increase your site's ranking, let's take a quick look at the things you shouldn't dothat is, things that can actually decrease your site's PageRank.

Site Design Problems to Avoid

Some web designers work against their own best interest by embracing methods that actually decrease a site's ranking in the Google index. Here are some of the most common problems you should try to avoid:

• Don't use &id= as a parameter in your URLs. (Google doesn't include in its index pages with this parameterwhich is typically used to specify session IDs or individual page or article numbers.)

• Don't use dynamic URLs. (Google can only index static URLs, not those that are dynamically generated.)

• Don't create hidden or invisible text or links on your page. (This is when you disguise keywords or links by making them the same or similar color as the page background, using a tiny font size, or hiding them within the HTML code itself. Google pretty much ignores hidden text, although this practice can sometimes actually decrease your page's ranking.)

• Don't include irrelevant words on a page or in a page's meta tags. (Google looks for targeted keywords; a keyword that is too dissimilar to other content on a page makes Google think that your page might be a "doorway" page.)

• Don't create a "doorway" page that contains little or no original content. (A doorway page is one that is optimized for a number of terms that aren't connected to a site's primary content; Google doesn't like doorway pages.)

• Don't overuse keywords in your content or meta code. (This is known as "keyword stuffing," and Google views this as a kind of search-related spam; too high a keyword density and Google will categorize your page as a doorway page, which is not good.)

• Don't duplicate content on multiple pages within your site, or via the use of multiple domains or subdomains. (Google utilizes a type of duplicate content filter that will filter out duplicate sites from its search results; it's always possible that your main site will be filtered out, while the duplicate content remains!)

  Tip

  To determine if your page's keyword density is too high, use the GoRank keyword density analyzer tool (www.gorank.com).

  
  

  Tip

  To scan for duplicate copies of your page on the Web, use the CopyScape tool (www.copyscape.com).

  
  

• Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects. (See the next section to learn more about these practices.)

• Don't link to a site that's been dropped or banned from the Google index. (Just search Google for the site in question; if it doesn't appear in the results, you don't want to link to it.)

• Don't have more code than you do actual text. (That means avoiding too many code-heavy effects, such as nested tables or JavaScript effects; if your important text is buried under hundreds of lines of code, you'll be at a disadvantage compared to a well-optimized site.)

• Don't include so much content (particularly large images) that your pages take too long to load. (GoogleBot doesn't like long load times, remember; along the same lines, hosting your pages on a very slow server could also drive off the GoogleBot.)

• Don't create messy code. (Neatness counts; messy HTML can confuse GoogleBot and cause it to miss important content.)

Deliberate Practices to Avoid

The previous section talked about things you might accidentally do that can adversely affect your PageRank rating. There are also some practices that sneaky web designers deliberately do to increase their page rank; Google takes issue with these practices, and can ban you from their index if you're caught.

To that end, here are some of the more nefarious outlawed optimization practices:

• Google bombing. Sometimes called Google washing or link bombing, this is an attempt to increase your PageRank by having a large number of sites link to a page by using identical anchor text. For example, you might register several domains and have all them link to a single site using the same anchor text for the links. Searching for the term used in the link anchor text will return the linked-to site high in the search results. (Google bombing often occurs in blogs, where a site owner will "bomb" multiple blog postings with replies linking to the owner's site.)

  Note

  Doorway pages are also known as gateway pages, landing pages, bridge pages, portal pages, zebra pages, jump pages, and entry pages.

  
  

• Keyword stuffing. This is when you insert hidden, random text on a page to increase the keyword density, and thus increase the apparent relevancy of a page. For example, if your page is about trains, you might insert several lines of invisible text at the bottom of the page repeating the keyword train, over and over. In the past, some search engines simply counted how often a keyword appeared on a page to determine relevance; today, Google employs algorithms to detect keyword stuffing. (A related technique is meta tag stuffing, where keywords are stuffed into HTML meta tags.)

• Doorway pages. This is a web page that is low in actual content, instead stuffed with repeating keywords and phrases designed to increase the page's search rank. Doorway pages typically require visitors to click a "click here to enter" link to enter the main website; in other instances, visitors to a doorway page are quickly redirected to another page.

• Link farms. This is a group of web pages that all link to one another. The purpose of a link farm is to increase the number of links to a given site; since PageRank is at least partially driven by the number of linked-to pages, using a link farm can make it appear as though a large number of sites are linking to a given site.

• Mirror websites. This is the hosting of multiple websites, all with the same content, but using different URLs. The goal is to increase the likelihood that any one (or more) of the mirror sites will appear on Google's search results pages.

• Cloaking. This is an attempt to mislead Google by serving up a different page to the GoogleBot crawler than will be seen by human visitors. This is sometimes used for code swapping, where one page is optimized to get a high ranking, and then swapped out for another page with different content.

• Scraper sites. This is a site that "scrapes" results pages from Google and other search engines to create phony content for a website. A scraper site is typically full of clickable ads.