As Search Engine Algorithms Evolve, Are Your Sites Safe From Penalization or Deletion?

Search technology improves everyday. It’s in the search engines best interest of course to ensure that happens if they want to grow their revenues. Users of Google, Yahoo!, MSN, or any other search engine use those engines because they feel they produce the most relevant results for their queries. Google dominates search because most Internet users (as I do) feel they produce the best search results. Most of the time anyways. Of course, we often times see spam sites dominate search results and nobody except the spammers themselves likes to see those results. As Google and the other search engines try to improve their algorithms to ensure better results for users, this means that many of those sites out on the web using techniques that go against Google’s guidelines will be at risk for penalization or deletion from their index. One of the most easily abused techniques is the use of invisible text (text that a search engine spider sees but visitors can’t). Most commonly, text is hidden by using the same colored text as the background. There are other ways of hiding text of course, stacking layers, in external CSS files, etc. Previously Google didn’t crawl through external CSS (not to my knowledge anyways) but Disney’s fan blog recent delisting proves that things are changing in that regard. Obviously, Google is trying to crack down on SEO techniques that they feel unfairly manipulate their results. It got me thinking and this leads me to the point of this post: Are the SEO techniques that you’re using on your sites (or your client’s site) safe?

As search engines like Google improve their algorithm, certain SEO techniques that have worked in the past may not work in the future. Whether it’s invisible text on something like your link building efforts, it would be wise to try to prevent your site from being smacked by the newest algorithms if you care about long term rankings. For a long time now, site owners have known the power of inbound links in improving site rankings.  This is why we all see those incredibly well written reciprocal link requests in our email box every morning. That whole process has been completely abused so sites that only gain links through link exchanges will be at risk. In a recent blog post after a recent SES, Matt Cutts said “…our algorithms can do a pretty good job of spotting excessive reciprocal links.”  He didn’t say “reciprocal links are bad” but why would their algorithm be attempting to detect reciprocal links?  Obviously they don’t approve when it’s done to excess. He did say “excessive reciprocal linking”. There’s nothing wrong with reciprocal linking but when Google detects that you have an outgoing link to all sites that are linking to you, it’s pretty obvious. When all your inbound links have the same anchor text, it’s pretty obvious. So what can you do to help ensure your sites are not in jeopardy? Don’t make your link building obvious and easy to detect. Some tips:

• When you do exchange links, make sure to link only to content related sites 
• Stay away from bad link neighborhoods. Always analyze the link profile of anyone you plan on linking to. Link to someone who is linking to a bad neighborhod, and essentially you’re linking to those sites as well.
• Make sure you have plenty of one way links to your site (at the very least buy some listings in some of the better directories).
• Make sure you deep link (get inbound links to internal pages of your site, not just your home page).
• Link to other sites that are helpful to your site visitors. Stop worrying about “leaking Page Rank”. Seriously. Share the link love if you ever want it in return.
• Vary your anchor text. The same text all the time is an obvious indicator. Make your link building look natural by using variation.
• Link Bait (or find someone to help you link bait).
• A significant jump in the amount of inbound links can be a red flag (If you’re link baiting you have nothing to worry about. If you’re spamming blogs you should be worried.)

Taking these steps should help to improve the chances that your site(s) do not face the wrath of the Google gods.