YNOT – On the web, traffic is everything. No matter how fabulous the content of a website, no one will be able to admire all that hard work if they can’t find the darn thing. Affiliate programs, link exchanges, press coverage, word of mouth, paid advertising and traffic trades all play into the traffic equation, but one of the biggest sources of traffic — and consequently revenue — remains search engines.
There is no one surefire method for ensuring your website ranks highly in search results. In fact, about the time someone decides he or she has figured out the latest Big Secret about search engine algorithms, the engines change the rules.
However, there are several mistakes that will cause search engines to sneer at your website, or worse, block the site altogether. The really bad news: Once an engine has placed a black mark next to your website’s URL, the mistake tends to follow the site forever, no matter how quickly it is rectified. Search engines are like elephants: They never forget.
Here are eight mistakes not to make.
1. Cloaking
Cloaking is an attempt to fool a search engine spider into thinking a webpage contains content other than what’s actually there. The technique often is employed when a less-than-ethical webmaster wants to “game” search results for popular terms like celebrities’ names. Using a small server-side script, the site developer delivers different page headers to search engine spiders — which identify themselves when they crawl pages — and common users. Get caught cloaking, and you may as well kiss goodbye any hope of seeing your URL in search results — ever.
2. Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing — the practice of repeating key terms in both meta tags and web page content — ranks right up with cloaking on the list of search engine cardinal sins. The habit became so bad several years ago that many search engines now ignore keyword meta tags altogether.
Of course you need to ensure the important terms on your site are mentioned often enough to stick in users’ minds, but it’s far better to do that in context (and in particular locations) than to throw the same names and phrases at folks in every other sentence. If the repetition seems stilted or annoys you or “cold” readers, it’s guaranteed to send spiders scrambling to happier hunting grounds.
3. Too many keywords
The adage “less is more” may be especially true when applied to web page search engine optimization. It’s tempting to list every keyword one can imagine associating with a page’s content, thinking the approach will guarantee the page ranks highly for at least one or two search terms.
Don’t fall into that trap. Limit your keywords and phrases to no more than three per page. More than that, and you risk diluting the most relevant of your terms and landing, at best, near the middle of the results for all of them.
4. Hidden text
Making text appear to spiders as though it is part of a page’s content but hiding that content from readers — by coding it in the same color as the background or employing CSS to place text behind images or beyond the page’s visible edges, for example — is an old, old trick that seems to resurface every so often in some new disguise. It still doesn’t work, folks. Since at least 2005, spiders have ignored a good deal of page content that seems even marginally contrived to attract them while remaining invisible to human users. Although some tricks (“NoScript” tags, for example) are useful for displaying alternate representations of content users may be unwilling or unable to view, by and large, if a user can’t see the words, spiders won’t index them.
5. Obfuscated links
Links that seem to lead one place but land the surfer in another are red flags for spiders. Users don’t like to think they’re being shuttled to a recipe for grandma’s apple pie, only to find themselves on a page depicting MILFs having entirely too much fun with apples. In short, if a textual URL indicates the reader will jump to a course description at Harvard.edu, for example, the underlying hypertext had better not link to videos of explicit romps at Harvard. By the same token, unless context indicates otherwise, a text link that says “see adorable sea monkeys here” should link to BrineShrimp.org (or something else about brine shrimp), not to SluttyBeachGirls.com.
It’s not nice to attempt to fool surfers or spiders. Surfers may simply grumble and move on, but spiders will blacklist your site.
6. Link farming
A link farm, sometimes called a webring, is a group of websites that all link to one another. Although historically they were considered good bets for sites seeking traffic, nowadays they most often are viewed as an attempt to spam search engine results. Although some link farms are created by hand, far more often they are the product of an automated service. The problem with automated link farms is that the sites within the farm may not be related to each other in any meaningful (read: content-based or thematic) way. Imagine the confusion, and potential outrage, among surfers if a website devoted to naked midget mud wrestling appeared near the top of the search results for “water on Mars.” For that reason, most search engines attach heavy penalties to every site in a farm. Google suggests building links the old-fashioned way: Request other similar sites exchange links with yours.
7. Broken links
Broken links are dead ends, as far as spiders are concerned. Temporary glitches are one thing, but spiders don’t care to waste their time with permanent 404 errors. They catalog “404” URLs for removal from the ranks. At the same time, they compile a list of locations that link to the dear, departed pages.
Not to be unfair, spiders do re-check their 404 link lists. The bad news is, pages that continue to link to a permanently missing page may see the nebulous (and ever-shifting) “quality score” used in ranking algorithms slip. Yes, spiders do bite the hand that feeds them.
8. Poor server performance
Some service interruptions are unavoidable, but server downtime can have a major influence on a website’s reliability rating. Google, for example, uses downtime as a gauge for trustworthiness: The more often your site is unavailable, the further down the results page the site will slip. Spiders don’t care why a page is unavailable (traffic overload, power outage, or other reasons), so blaming your hosting company for “issues” won’t help your case.
9. Lengthy URLs
Websites like YNOT.com and others use content-management systems that generate URLs from the titles of dynamically generated pages. The practice usually simplifies internal and external searches and can let surfers know right away whether they’ve arrived where they intended to go.
However, the longer a URL, the more likely it will be truncated by spiders that have been coded to index only the first “x” number of characters. Each search engine has its own formula for URL crawling, so there’s no easy answer to the question “How many is too many?” Generally speaking, though, the shorter the descriptive URL, the better. Most CMS backends allow content authors to adjust the URL parameters without perverting the page title.
