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subject: Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings (part 1) [print this page]

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.

by: Vonnee Chong

welcome to loan (http://www.yloan.com/)