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Promotion Tip:
Getting A Kick OUT Of Search Engines
by Larisa Thomason,
Senior Web Analyst,
NetMechanic, Inc.
Expulsion is a scary word to most students, but webmasters worry about it too. Schools usually expel students for a few days; search engines ban sites for months - or even permanently.
Expulsion is disastrous for any site that depends on search engine traffic to generate visitors and sales. It's a lot easier to get banned by a search engine than it is to achieve a high ranking. So easy in fact, that many sites are banned for perfectly innocent hosting and design decisions.
Choose Your Web Host Carefully
Web host selection is one of the first major decisions you'll make in the early design stages. Cost, speed, and customer support are all important factors for you to consider, but also consider how Search Engines may view your selection. Right or wrong, you may be judged - and banned - based on the company you keep.
Free hosting services are an excellent way to get comfortable with basic Web design without paying a monthly hosting charge, but it's not a good long-term solution. Free hosts are also a haven for spammers who set up bogus sites for free, then inundate search engines with submissions. For this reason, many search engines automatically block all submissions from sites like Geocities. Use free hosts if you want a site to track a family reunion, wedding plans, or post vacation photos for friends and relatives. Find a reputable, paid host if you want search engines to index your site.
Note the emphasis on "reputable." If your perfectly legitimate, family-friendly site resides on the same server with adult sites, search engines may ban all of you. Most Web hosts use a technique called "virtual hosting" where many site domain names are mapped on a single server under the same IP address. Many adult sites flood search engines with spam submissions, so search engines sometimes retaliate by banning the underlying IP address entirely. Perfectly innocent sites can get banned just because they share an IP address with the spam site. Carefully study the host's Terms and Conditions section and know their policy on adult sites before you sign up.
Bad Design Choices
A good Web host is only part of the equation; search engines are even more concerned about what's on your page - and they all look for different things. Webmasters who struggled to find the magic formula that would optimize their sites on all search engines thought they had found it with gateway pages. As so often happens, spammers found them too and began to abuse them. Alta Vista recently announced that it would begin banning gateway pages as spam because some sites used them to achieve a high ranking on a certain topic but then took the visitor to a page that focused on something completely different. Other search engines haven't followed yet, but avoid using gateway pages on Alta Vista and watch the others for policy changes.
Improper keyword selection will also hurt you if you select keywords that aren't related to your topic and "stuff" them into your text. An extreme example is this: you could use the word "computer" in your META Keyword tag, then insert the word computer over and over at the bottom of a page devoted to vegetable gardening. This is called "keyword stuffing" and search engines almost always catch it and penalize you. If they don't, your visitors will because they'll have wasted their time visiting a site completely unrelated to their search term. Some search engines even offer users the opportunity to report spam sites. Choose and use your keywords carefully to avoid having them misinterpreted by search engine algorithms.
Search engine policies and algorithms change constantly. If you don't have the time to research them all, try NetMechanic's Search Engine Power Pack. It will help you optimize your code and content for search engine algorithms and warn you about techniques that may get you banned by search engines.
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