Linking to Bad Neighborhoods Can Ruin your PageRank

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Did your website or one of your webpages drop in rank recently (both in page rank and keyword rank). It could be the result of linking to a bad neighborhood. A bad neighborhood is a site that the quality search engines won't link to. Google's Webmaster Guidelines states:

"In particular, avoid links to web spammers or 'bad neighborhoods' on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links."

WHAT IS A BAD NEIGHBORHOOD?

(following words are misspelled on purpose to prevent this page for being tagged as a bad neighborhood)

Link Farms (automated linking and uncategorized)
Triangular Linking Schemes (you link to my other site and I'll link to your site from this site).
FFA (Free For All Directory)
Gammbbling sites.
Pooorrnnnoo sites.
Sexxxxxxx and ADDUlt sites
Web spammers (keyword stuffing on the page or in the code)
Websites that have been banned by Google (gray page rank bar)

You may not receive a penalty or drop in keyword rank for just a few bad neighborhood links but it's not safe to take a chance. Delete anything that looks suspicious.

You can check the links visually but then you have to check the all the outgoing links of the site you are linking to also.

Here is a tool that checks sites for Bad Neighboorhoods. However it is not flawless. It will show bad links for sites that have links to innocent articles warning about Poooorrrnno and Sexxxxx and Gammbbling and even tags SafeSurf as a bad neighboorhood because they have an article doing the same. Christian sites discussing the same are really in trouble according to this tool. I used to have a FreeFind search tool on my site but they had bad neighborhood links so I removed them just to be safe. And I've seen the same problems with Stat Counter linking to questionable sites. The owner of this tool states that when warnings show up it's just an indication that you need to do further checking on that site yourself, not that you will be banned for those links. This tool will also show you where there are 404 errors (broken links) to sites you are linking to so it's useful in that respect.

If you know of a more discriminating tool please let me know.

Lori Eldridge
Lori's Web Design
Copyright 3-9-08
All Rights Reserved

How to Increase Website Traffic During a Recession.

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Consider Main Holidays. Unless your website sells retail items your traffic may drop during the holidays. You can increase traffic for each holiday by promoting something that people will be searching for during those holidays. For instance I set up a turkey animation on my graphics pages and I get a 25% increase in traffic during Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. On my poetry site I have a bible study on what day of the week Christ died, which I believe was a Thursday, which doubles my traffic for that site around the Easter Holiday. What time of year does your website traffic slow down? Pick a holiday near that time and focus on things of interest to those people.

Your Favorite Hobby: If your website is commercial in nature you can increase traffic by providing free content. In what area do you have special talents? If you're a good photographer you can offer free photos to increase traffic. If you're a good cook provide free recipies. A good musician can profide free audios of music. If you have a consultant service offer free consulation once a month. If you are an inspector offer free advice in your area of expertise.

Set up a Blog: Keep your blog on the same focus as your website but write posts more like news briefs or items of interest to your website visitors that are too small to put into a web page. Link to your website often and utilize deep links whenever possible. If you allow comments it will require you to monitor posts as it will attract spammers.

Set up a Forum: If you believe your site visitors would like to post messages and communicate with others on the focus of your website then set up a bulletin board or forum. However, the main drawback to forums is you will need someone to act as administrator on a daily basis to monitor posts and software as this will attract a lot of spammers.

Write Articles: If you post articles on other websites with a link to your website in each article then it will bring more traffic. However, don't post the same articles on your own website or those pages could be penalized for duplicate content.

Participate in blogs and Forums: Find blogs or forums that have the same focus as your website and participate in disucssions. The links may or may not benefit your website due to most forums putting the rel="nofollow" tag on links but it will likely bring you traffic.

Hot Topics: Find a hot topic in the news that is of interest to your website visitors and write articles on those topics.

Lori Eldridge
Lori's Web Design
Copyright 2-26-08
All Rights Reserved
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Causes for a Drop in Keyword Rank in Search Engines

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I recently evaluated a website to determine why it had dropped in keyword rank suddenly when it was previously ranking in the top 5 for it's site name. After a couple hours of reasearch it was determined the cause was due to someone copying his home page on several other websites. The posts were dated 5 days before his keyword rank dropped which made it obvious this was the reason.

Other problems that can cause a website to drop in rank:

Gathering links too fast
Adding too many pages too fast
Linking to bad neighborhoods
Adding hidden text or links to your website
Setting up Doorway pages to fool search engines
Having your website hijacked by a 302, 301 or meta refresh redirect.
Using an automated rank checker
Installing malware, trojans, etc. that can harm visitor's computers.
Having only affiliate links and very little other content.
Requiring visitor to link to your site for a service.
A redesign that installs Javascript on links for puts content in frames.
Installing Flash that takes too long to download and deters search engine bots.
Another site on shared hosting being penalized for any of the above.
Disallowing your website from search engines in robots.txt

Click here to have your website evaluated for a drop in keyword rank.

Lori Eldridge
Lori's Web Design
Copyright 2-15-08
All Rights Reserved
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How to Check for Keyword Ranking Drop in Google.

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If you have experienced your keyword ranking dropping suddenly in Google then the following may help expose the reason for the decline.

CHECKING GOOGLE'S INDEX:

Search for your business name. Unless you come up #1 then your site may be penalized or filtered out of Google results (unless other sites use the same name).

Use this command in Google site:yourdomain.com. It should list all the pages that Google has indexed for your website. If Google doesn't have your website listed, and it was previously, then your site has probably been banned from Google results.

BREAKING GOOGLE GUIDELINES:

Make sure you are not breaking any of the following Google quidelines:

Hidden test or links
Cloaking
Sneaky redirects (302 or 301 redirects pointing at other sites)
Using an automated keyword ranking tool
Spammy text
Duplicate content
Doorway pages
Thin Affiliate with AdSense ads (no original content)
Adding too many pages or backlinks too fast
Selling or buying links
Overoptimized content
Alt tag spam
Split doman
Duplicate home pages
Linking to banned websites
Multiple Domains with same content
Faulty Robots text or Htaccess file

HIJACKING OR COPIED CONTENT:

Hijacking a website doesn't happen too often any more because the culprits can loose their website or ranking. However if anyone sets up a 301 or 302 redirect pointing at your site it can cause your keyword rank to drop drastically and suddenly. The best way to find these is to watch your stats program for odd backlinks. See my article on Hijacking Web Pages and related articles on how to report hijackers.

If your important pages are copied, unless your site is several years old, it can also cause a seriious ranking problem for your website. Check your website frequently in copyscape.com for this problem.

OTHER PROBLEMS AFFECTING KEYWORD RANK:

These are not necessarily a penalty but affect ranking nevertheless:

Titles all the same
Descriptions all the same
Links in Framed pages, Image Maps or Javascript
Important text in Flash
Keywords in Images

When your titles are all the same (usually caused by not properly utilizing a WYSIWYG program) then search engines think you have the same content on every page. The same with description tags. If you don't use a description tag then search engines will pick up the first text on your page (usually the menu text) which usually does not tell the viewer what your page is about. Both of these can severely affect your keyword ranking.

Google is getting pretty good at indexing text and links in Javascript and image maps but other search engines are not, so best to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to control mouseovers on links. Search engines also can't read text in images and the same can be said for Flash so make sure your important text is repeated on the page in plain text.

ASKING FOR REINCLUSION

If you believe your site was penalized by Google fix the problems and then ask for reinclusion through Google's Webmaster Tools. You'll have to set up a Google account for your website first. Tell Google everything you know about the problem.

TIME TO RECUPERATE

After you fix the problems it may take a while for Google to notice the changes if it hasn't been indexing your website very often. Check the cache date before you start fixing your website and frequently thereafter to get an idea of how long it takes for Google to come back. Then assume it may take a few weeks or months for the changes to show up in Google.

Lori Eldridge
Lori's Web Design
Copyright February 7, 2008
All Rights Reserved
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