Vancouver Search Engine Optimization

Have you heard of the term “blacklisted” before? How about when referring to Internet search engines? If you own or promote a client’s website, you need to be familiar with what it means to be “blacklisted” by the search engines and how to avoid finding yourself in such a situation.

What Does “Blacklisted” Mean?

When a search engine such as Google “blacklists” your website, your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) will either be bumped, or your entire website may be banned from the search engine results altogether. This is done when the search engines penalize you for engaging in practices that they frown upon.

Many website owners who are inexperienced in search engine optimization- or who may not even know what SEO is- may unwittingly harm their search engine rankings, causing their website to be blacklisted by the search engines. One rule of thumb to keep in mind when it comes to SEO is that quality trumps quantity.

Making bad SEO decisions can severely impair your traffic and ranking in the search engines for an extended period of time. One illustration I commonly use is that of losing weight: It’s easier to keep weight off in the first place than it is to lose weight after it’s been gained. The same goes for SEO. Implementing safe and effective search engine practices from day one will save you tons of time and money over recovering from poor decisions. Therefore, you need to examine some of the most common techniques website owners implement, attempting to improve their search engine ranking but resulting in their being blacklisted.
Keyword Spam

Probably the most common mistakes website owners make that results in their being blacklisted by the search engines reside in their META tags. One of these mistakes is keyword spam.

Keyword spam is when you load your META keywords with words or phrases that have nothing to do with your page’s content. This is most commonly done when a website owner attempts to get their page ranked well for a desired keyword, but the content on the page is irrelevant.

For example, if your page discusses how to replace a fuel filter on a Chevy truck, there would be no point in using META tags pertaining to dog collars- it’s totally irrelevant.

Something I see quite often in my SEO evaluations for clients is that they use the same META tags for every single page on their website. Be sure each page has its own META tags that are relevant to its content, or risk the chance of being blacklisted.
Keyword Repetition

A common misunderstanding website owners have is that the more times their target keywords appear in their META tag, the higher their site will rank for that keyword. This is simply not true- remember, quality trumps quantity.

An example of this would be having your META keyword tag appear as:

website hosting, web hosting, hosting, web host, hosting, website host, hosting

As you can see, the word “hosting” is repeated multiple times in effort to get the page ranked for the single keyword “hosting”. However, it would be more efficient to simply include the word one time. By repeating the same keyword over and over, search engines may penalize your ranking and can possibly result in your being blacklisted if it’s severe enough.
Cloned Content

If there’s something search engines hate it’s cloned content- the same exact content on multiple pages or websites. This has been especially true over the past few years as search engine algorithms have evolved.

With the widespread availability of RSS feeds, it has become very simple for website and blog owners to directly syndicate content onto their own sites, thinking that their search engine rankings will improve since they are pumping out tons of new content.

The problem with this misconception is that the content isn’t “new”, and having an “autoblog” or cloned website can definitely get you blacklisted by the search engines.
Invisible Text

Using invisible text worked like a charm in 1995, but the only thing it will do for you now is get you blacklisted.

A few years back, it was not uncommon for a website owner to place invisible text all over their site with the keywords they wanted to rank well for repeated over and over again in order to make it appear more content rich and to get their page ranked higher in the search engines. An example of invisible text would be placing white text over a white background. Being nothing more than a huge stockpile of keywords, the invisible text would have no real value to the reader, so it would not be seen.

Search engines have become smarter and can detect such practices much easier now, and in efforts to rank pages well which are valuable to the readers, pages with invisible text will get you blacklisted.
Search Engine Submit Spam

Again, ten years ago we all had to manually submit our websites to the search engines in order for them to find it and get it listed in their search results. There’s hardly a reason to do that now, as the search engine spiders are usually all over your site automatically. As a matter of fact, I’ve put new websites on brand new domain names online and have seen them listed in Google in as little as 80 minutes later!

However, the option to manually submit your website to the search engines isn’t still available because you shouldn’t do it. There’s nothing wrong with submitting your site, but many website owners will submit their site over and over again. You should never submit your website to the same search engine more than once a month. If your website still has still not been listed after 30 days, resubmit it.

If the search engine already has your site listed, don’t continue to submit the site- there’s no need. If you do, the search engines will see this as spam and will blacklist your site.

How can you tell if your website has already been listed? By doing a search like this:

site:jwrmedia.com

Replacing the above example with your own domain name will display all of the pages the search engine has listed for your website. If it’s already found it, there’s no need to keep resubmitting your site or you can get blacklisted.
Poor Quality Web Host

In efforts to reduce costs, many website owners will choose free or very cheap “fly-by-night” web hosting companies to host their site. The goal of the search engines is to provide searchers with the highest quality result for what they’re searching for.

If the search engine spiders come to scan your site and it’s frequently offline or loads very slowly, they will get fed up and move on. Your website can be blacklisted because they will see that the quality is not very high and they don’t want searchers to be landing on dead links.

Shared web hosting packages by reputable hosting companies are very inexpensive anyway, ranging from $4-$10/month. One major web host known for good uptime is Hostforweb.
Shared IP Address

Most hosting packages will host your website on the same IP address as hundreds of other websites. The problem with this is that if some of the other websites on the same IP address as you engage in activities that get them blacklisted from the search engines, this can rub off on you.

Most web hosts can provide you with your own dedicated IP address for about $2-$5/month. If you’re serious about SEO, I would highly recommend this option. This way, your website is the only one using the IP address so you don’t have to worry about someone else getting your site blacklisted because of their actions.
Junk Directory Submissions

Again, going back 10 years, directory submissions were a big hit. Nowadays, they’re not the golden ticket to high search engine rankings that many people make them out to be.

Many website owners will pay someone a seemingly little amount of money to mass submit their website to hundreds or even thousands of web directories. This is a sure-fire way to get your website blacklisted for a number of reasons.

First, having your website suddenly listed on 5,000 other sites overnight is a telltale sign of spamming. Secondly, most automated submissions will mess up the submission process anyway, submitting your site to irrelevant categories and messing up the text and links included with the submission. Third, most of these web directories are poorly ranked themselves which can bring your site’s ranking down. The great majority of them will have a Pagerank of 0 or 1, and if your website has a higher Pagerank it can pull yours down.

Again, remember our rule of thumb- quality trumps quantity.
Paid Link Placement

Search engines now frown upon “unnatural” and paid placements on other websites. Take the popular site amongst bloggers of Text-Link-Ads.com. If you are using their service or are linking to their site run away!

Google knows that it’s nothing but a service promoting “unnatural” paid links and has totally blacklisted them. For example, check their Google Pagerank- it’s not even ranked. Do a search for “text-link-ads.com”- they don’t even rank for their own domain name! As a matter of fact, Google has totally blacklisted their website. If you don’t want to be blacklisted, don’t participate in ANY paid link placement. If you pay for links on an individual basis, be sure the site owner doesn’t place your link anywhere near text such as “Sponsors” or “Paid Links”. The search engines will flag the link as “unnatural” and blacklist your website.

So, hopefully you will keep these points in mind as you promote your website. You can achieve high search engine rankings, but it takes a lot of hard work and effort, and usually does not happen overnight. Don’t participate in anything that can get your website blacklisted because by doing so, all your hard work will have been for nothing.

If you want some tips on how to legitimately get your web pages to rank well in the search engines, check out my article How To Make A Great Landing Page. If you would like me to personally work on your site to improve it’s search engine rankings, please visit my Google SEO services site.

By triphp.com

WordPress comes preinstalled with a plug-in called Akismet. This plug-in is not activated by default and it is up to you to activate and configure it. To activate this plug-in simply go to the plug-ins tab in your administrative backend. Click on “Install Plug-Ins” and you’ll see a list of plug-ins available to you. Click on activate underneath the Akismet plug-in and upon doing so you’ll be prompted to insert a key to allow you to use the plug-in.

You’ll need to go to the official Akismet website and register for a key (Donating on akismet is optional). Upon registering you’ll receive your key which will need to copy and paste and insert into the options area of Akismet.

Once the key is pasted in place simply click save changes and you’re all set.

After a period of time you’ll see the number of comments Akismet has blocked from appearing on your website. This number will show in the main dashboard area of WordPress. It will also show you a number of spam comments that are currently awaiting your attention. It is a good idea to check these once in a while to make sure Akismet has not flagged anything as spam that should be.

If you need help with your wordpress website, feel free to contact us. We would love to work on your next project with you!

Visit Metro BC Heating Services

The ads take the format of a short text ad that includes a title line, two short descriptive lines and a URL link to a website or a specific website page.

The ad will appear on the page of results you decide you want to appear in. For instance page 1 of Google for a search result. The ads appear at the top and to the right of the organic search engine results. You can also pitch at what position on the page your ad will appear, through the amount you bid. Crudely this may mean the more you bid for a phrase, the higher your ad appears on page 1 of the Google Result.

Research shows us that 87% of web users do not scan past page 1 of search engine results. In addition, the higher your website appears on a page will result in more visitors to your website, as web users prefer to click on the ads/search results at the top of the page.

So why use Google Adwords?

It is now apparent that there is a difference between the types of visitor to a website: “browsing traffic”, or, visitors that may have found a website in a search engines organic result, behave differently to traffic that comes directly from Google Adwords or “pay per click traffic”. The reason for this is simple: traffic via surfing in organic results is simply often browsing for information where as traffic via pay per click knows that when they are clicking on a ad, it is simply that, an ad and that the advertisement is for something they need and want to buy, whether that be a product or services. Therefore, you don’t necessarily need millions of visitors via browsing, rather than specific targeted visitors via Google Adwords.

Its not quite as simple as that!

Sorry to say, yes you can pitch the highest bid for phrases and gain some great positions and traffic. You could set up a Google Adword Account and Campaign in a matter of minutes, but without Google Adword Management, you will find often that not only will your budget get used up and not result in any sales or enquiries, but the traffic you do send via this method to your website, may be disappointed when they get there if the page they land on is not relevant to their search: they will simply click away and you will have lost budget and a potential customer.

In addition, through effective Google Adword Management, not only will your campaigns become more effective in driving relevant targeted traffic to your website, the amount you bid for with your desired phrases may be less than your competition and in many instances your ad will appear higher in the Google search result even though you are bidding less than your competitor for a phrase!

How can this be?

When deciding who gets top billing among the sponsored links for phrases, Google factors in bids and how many people click through each ad, giving preference to the more effective ads. If an add and its destination are relevant to the phrase marketed, it is more likely to gain a visitor via pay per click, and one that is relevant and potentially more likely to become a customer.

Your Next Step!

Contact us to discuss how our Google Adwords Management services can help your Business or company.

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Visit The Organizing Wizard

1. Do you have a product to sell or service you want to promote? Press releases are a great way to get some links to your website. With the many free directories press releases available allowing unlimited, this is an easy strategy of linkage.

2. Always Leave Links: No matter where you go, where you write always leave a link. When browsing the forums or blog entries that relate to or are related to your website in any way, leave a link as your signature. This applies to any emails that you write well, especially the emails you can send a web site for advice, as these emails are likely published.

3. In the same line of letting blogs, you can create your own “Do-Follow,” a forum or a blog you would reference your website in your signature. From discussion forums on various topics, whether related to the theme of your website traffic or not is a binding technique easy to get.

4. Use social bookmarking site to leave a link to your website. You can find services that will make your page on multiple sites at once, not to occupy all his time markers each of its pages, or you can do it manually.

5. Site submission to search engines is another way to get great access to your website. You can do it manually or with the technologies available for most websites and blogs, you can ping the search engine automatically every time you update your website.

6. Share and share alike; web site to share videos and photos can get many links to your site indexed. Using Flickr to post their photos and videos of business and the comments reproduced or clause conferring a line like “the site name and URL” legally binds users to post their photos when making web links use of pictures or videos.

7. article submissions guide not only show the creative side of business, was also let you share the URL of your website with hundreds of web sites. With the latest technology available, you can send to over 200 article directories in each and every one of the items your URL at the bottom.

8. Link exchange could easily get the URL of your website on many web sites, all indexed by search engines regularly. Simply websites relating to your own address and, if your site content can be trusted, the webmaster will more than likely add your link in exchange for adding to your to your website.

9. Online classifieds such as Facebook, MySpace and other websites linked using a “classified section,” provides an easy way to get more links pointing to your URL. Almost any web site or major network has a classified section, either free or paid for the section.

10. Internal or cross-link campaigns are a bit more difficult, such as joining the Wikipedia page, etc. However, these are the most worthy as the search engines will give your website more weight to the links. Sign up for an account on Wikipedia and other web sites and participate in the publication of relevant information, trying to refer to their website at the bottom of the page.