Hermesmyth Internet Marketing Blog

If you website ranking well and positioned well in search engine, and disappeared suddenly from the search listing after few content additions of content. No worries! All you have to do is check if there was duplication of content in your website or your website content was copied to a website which has a better page rank then yours. The below are few possibilities of a sudden disappearance of website from search engines.

Case 1: Duplication of Content

To check if the website content is copied from some other site visit www.copyscape.com and analyse your website. This shows the list of site which has similar content. So if you feel like the content in your website is same like the other, just tweak your content. In case your content is original and someone has copied it, report it to Google or any other search engine provider.

Case 2: Duplication of Content within website or from your old website

If you have the same content in 2 different web page links, then you need to block one from search engine index, if you want the other page not to be indexed. To do this, visit Google Webmaster central, add and block the link which you don’t want the search engine to crawl. (Though you can do this using the .htaccess or robots.txt, this method will also work in Google – as Google is most used search engine, importance is given to Google search)

In case your entire site or specific pages is the same as your old website, all you have to do is take the content and have them in the server backup, and see that the old website doesn’t appear. Once the entire website shows a 404 error, resubmit it to search engines, so that once they crawl, if there is no content found in the website, search engines will remove them from their index.

Case 3: Website Server IP

This rarely does happen, if a website has two servers 1. Live server and 2. Development server (which is not supposed to be available for public and is used in internal organisations). If you buy a website ip from a service provider, and by chance you get a the ip of the link, which was ranking good and now is dead, the content which you may post would reflect on the website which doesn’t belong to you. So your website will appear in 2 different website.(only the url will be different, all the others will remain same) This is something the Web host provider needs to take care off. In this case, you need to ask the host provider to clear the cache of the old server.

Case 4: Link Spamming

Link Spamming is frequently changing the links with the same content. When a search engine crawls the website, and if the links keep on changing, and each time, the previous link is dead/broken, then search engines will think, those are spamming links. So this may also lead to drop in search listings.

Also Watch the Video – These are the insights given my Matt Cutts, Google

Source: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

Apart from this there are many reasons, but these are few important points, which optimizers see that there is a sudden drop in the traffic. (Even I forgot, these things, and later realized, these are the things, I missed out during analysis. Though I concentrated on the few things which does occur normally)

Source:  http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-site-review-session-from-google-io-2010/

As we discussed already, its always good to acquire natural links for websites. Recently I came across the posting “Calling for Link Spam Reports” by MattCutts – a Software Engineer in Google, stating that Google has been aggressively working on the new algorithms to tackle linkspam.

Linkspam is an illegal method of obtaining page rank, where a website owner will buy paid links from some other websites which has good page rank, acquiring links by providing spam comments, excessive reciprocal link exchanging and many more.

Actually both buying and selling links doesn’t adhere to Google policies, hence these types of links are intended to manipulate the page rank and increase the website visits. But the saddest part is that most of the SEO (Seach Engine Optimization) Companies, do paid linking as business.

I strongly suggest SEO”s to adhere to the Google search engine optimization policies and work hard towards it to achieve your website goals. Do not follow illegal methods of obtaining page ranks and later feel for it, once your site gets blocked or pushed to the last results.

So instead think Positive – while you are thinking to post a link somewhere in a website, just check for relevance, hence Google always checks for Quality, Quantity and Relevancy when manipulating page ranks.

If you come across a website which buys or sells link, just post a complaint to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1

Acquiring natural links may be sometimes difficult for beginners but wonder, Slow and Steady wins the Race. Build your website natural links slowly, and get good page ranks in the long run

Many of the fresh search engine optimizers (SEO’s) as well as experienced sometimes knowingly or unknowingly in order to increase the website traffic start using few unethical ways which doesn’t obey the SEO guidelines. These are done in order to bring the page rank, and increase the website traffic in a short period of time.

So what are the common black hat seo techniques that are followed and what happens to a website if black hat seo are used?

Here the answer for your question.

Generally, black hat seo is kind of spam and unethical, for which search engine companies penalize for misuse by banning the website from their search engines.

Using Invisible Text: This is a common method, in which website developers use to get the list of top searched keywords and put them in the page, in the website background color. When a person searches in a search engine a using a specific keyword might reach this page, whereas the page which he lands has nothing to do with that keyword, nor it would be visible to the website visitor.

Below is a recent site that I got in my Google alert for a keyword I subscribed. When I went to the website, there is irrelevant content to a furniture shop . Here is the invisible text “keywords” they used to rank it.

Stuffing Keywords: Lot of keywords are stuffed in a specific page, with lot of repetitions, which is against the search engine policies. Also the Meta tags also have lot of keywords.

Website Cloaking: A webpage is created for the sole purpose of increasing the website traffic by identifying the search engine’s spider user agent or ip address. When a user visits the page, he would be taken to some other page which wouldn’t be related to what was shown in search results.

Doorway Page: A page is optimized for specific keywords and once starts getting in traffic, the website would be redirected to the real website. This is also similar to website cloaking.

Link Farms: This is a kind of spamming the search engines indexing algorithm. This is also known as spamdexing. It linking to site whereever possible, but which are not relevant to the content or keywords. This is made with the only intention to increase the backlinks, reciprocal link, which search engine see as spamming, as it is against the search engine indexing policies.

 Penalty:

 Is there a good penalty other than blocking or re-ranking the site? Yes, good penalizes by blocking the site or by dropping site from its current position to some the bottom of the results.

Here is the site, that was blocked by Google  for using Black Hat Technique. ( I have provided the image of the invisible text given in the html code)

Today as soon I came in, I just checked for few seo alerts. I found this news and thought I should definitely share with you all.

“In the last week, more than 280 search terms have been attacked by more than 6,600 black hat search engine optimization (SEO) operations, according to a study by SonicWall.”

Read the full article here: http://www.lastclicknews.com/black-hat-seo-operations-become-rampant-101052.html

There are different types of HATS, the Search Engine Optimizers wear. Below are list of seo hats. In fact, the true fact is that Black Hat, Grey Hat and White Hat SEO alone exists. Whereas people as they tried different terminologies in SEO to bring their site to top in SERP’s i.e. Search Engine Results Page, they gave different names such as yellow hat, green hat, brown hat, purple hat, pink hat and so on as  they wish, but those did not really get life and did not exist.

Black Hat SEO:

The word itself says the unethical SEO. In this method of SEO, the keywords are stuffed irrelevant to the content, and is not visible to humans i.e. the text colour would be matched with the background colour of the webpage. Also this type of SEO is often adopted to bring the website to top ranking faster. Search Engines identify and block sites which rank top using Black Hat SEO Method.

Grey Hat SEO:

This is a combination of both black hat seo as well as white hat seo. Here they dont stuff the keyword but this includes buying links, semantic links, keyword file naming and density manipulation. Most of the Grey Hat SEO methods are proclaimed as white hat SEO, whereas search engines are against websites which buy links from third party websites.

Green Hat SEO:

This is a method and action which involves lot of tactics and actions to draw more website visitors. This is all about having fun and doing unnecessary things over a website to gain visitors.

Red Hat SEO: 

This is just an observable phenomenon i.e. evaluation hypotheses of what is happening over the web. This is also like White Hat SEO.
White Hat SEO:

This is an ethical SEO method. Here Search Engine Optimizers follow the SEO Guidelines and work on acquiring natural links. This is a slow and a steady process which brings good SERP’s in the long run.

Blue Hat SEO:

This is an advanced SEO technique. Blue Hat Search Engine Optimizers have good knowledge about both Black as well as White hat seo, which makes the search engine optimizer to think in the creative aspect of seo, without voiding the seo guidelines.

So now you know which hat to choose right?

Many of us has come across this  problem while surfing the website such  as 404 Error – The page cannot be displayed error.What are these and why do they occur? Does these affect the search rankings? What needs to be done to avoid these? are few questions which may arise, when you come across such 404 Page Not Found Error.

Generally 404 – Page Not Found error  are termed as “Broken Links”. These broken links occur, when there is a file missing in the root directory of the website, or the actual file name was which was working, has been renamed to something, will show as a broken link.

When it comes to search engine ranking, 404 definitely plays a role in it.  More number of broken links in a website also leads to drop in the  page ranks. For instance,  you would  do link building for certain pages  and have acquired lot of external links, which provides a good value to you site. If you change the file name or remove the file in the web root directory, it would be a 404 error page. So this 404 error would reduce the traffic to the website, and also the chances of page rank drop is expected.

In order avoid such things the  404 – Page not found error webpage needs to be redirected to the right link or the new link, sometimes even to the homepage. These kind of redirects is termed as 301-Redirects.   The redirect script should be wrote in the .htaccess file, which would be available as an hidden file in the website root directory. If that not available, you need to create one.

The  404-error page to a  301-redirect script  is below. This needs to be added to the .htaccess file.

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.htm$ http://www.your-domain-name.com/ [R=301,L]

The above script is valid for a specific i.e. single re-redirect only.  In case of  you need to redirect any 404 error pages to your home page, then you need to use the below rule.

RewriteRule ^whatever/[^.]+)$ http://www.your-domain-name.com/$1/ [R=301,L]

The above specified redirect script are required in the htacess to make 301 redirections, whereas if you want to redirect a  www.example.com domain to www.example.co.in  then you need to create a  index.html file and add it to the root director of www.example.com. The simple re-direct html script required for that is

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″>
<meta name=”Description” content=”any description regarding your website “>
<meta http-equiv=”Refresh” content=”1; url=http://www.example.co.in /”>
<title>Example of HTML Re-redirect</title>
</head>
</html>

The above can be done in .htaccess as well.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.co.in/$1 [R=301,L]

The above redirects are also considered more imporant in Search Engine Optimizaiton. Hope this helps. Still have got questions, just post it in comments, we would surely reply you. 

When its comes to Organic Search, it better to have the below number of characters/words to optimize it effectively.

Title Tag: 60 Character or 9 words (Title Tag is most important in SEO, which should have the right focus keywords hence, search engines gives 98% importance to Title Tag)

Keywords Tag: 250 characters or 25 words

Description Tag: 250 characters or 25 words

H1,H2, H3 Tags: Focus Keywords and Key Pharases can be provided, which will help in long tail keyword searches.

Keyword Density in content: Many Say that keyword density is not required, but where still it is good to have some 2 to 3% of keyword density, which makes the search engine crawl and show up the results.

Bear in mind that, Relevancy of keywords is more important while optimizing a website. See that the Title Tag, keyword tag, description tag and the content of the website has got the relevant keywords and key pharases.

Note: Inorder to bring keyword relavancy, don’t stuff the keywords, which may result in adverse/negative results

As said earlier search engine spiders just views website as text. It won’t be able view either the content or html hyper links in a specified webpage which is in the form of Java script, flash player, flash content, image type texts etc. Might be the Search Engine algorithms are coded like that . Soon this may also change. Coming back the point, here is how you can see how the spider looks into a website.

Click this website http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php and type in your url, this shows how the search engine views your website.

If you wish you can type in www.hermesmyth.com to have a look of how the search engines views my internet blog website or if you wish to buy your own domain and hosting space, click the banner below.

Most of the website designers and developers  often concentrate on the design, look and feel, aesthetics of the website, whereas  forget about the name, size and the number  of  images appearing in the webpage. So it’s a must  to optimize the images. There are two types of Graphic Optimization,  one which helps in acheiving high speed website and the other which help in search engine optimization.

1. Optimizing the Image Size ie. Creating a image which is less in size.
 
The graphic/image present in the website should be less in size and more efficient , hence when a website gets downloaded, along with the image also gets downloaded. So if the image size is big, then it would take time for the website to display and also consumes high bandwidth.

Say for example, if a image is 40 KB, it would take some time to get downloaded, instead if it is just 4 KB, within a fraction of milli-seconds it would get downloaded, which results in quick display of the web page.

Recommendation:  It’s recommended that the homepage or any other page is less than 200 KB overall and with less than 20 Objects. This would increase the download speed of the website at the same time doesn’t consume more bandwidth.

2. Optimizing the Image Name

When Website Templates are created, it involves writing a style sheet, which may contain some images. It is good to name the images as header_img.gif , body_img_bg.gif etc in case of style sheets to easily understand,  whereas when it comes to products boxes, mangement people images, its good to have the name related that product.

Say for example, if there is an antivirus program boxshot,  you can name the image as “Buy_Antivirus.gif” with an alt text as “Virus protection software” etc. So this would also help the website listed in search engines for keywords like buy antivirus software protection etc. Because all the search engine spiders see only the text and not the image. So its necessary to the image with relevant names which adds value to SEO. In case you the an antivirus software as “as.jpg” then as is not going to be listed nor conveys a meaning.

So while creating a website HTML,HTML Images, CSS (Cascading Style Sheet)Images, Image names , size , format (recommended is gif, png) ,Javascript, Graphics and multimedia objects should be given importance.

Hope this helps!