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.
