Natural links are one of the most important factors that are used to determine PageRank by search engines. However, some webmasters misunderstand it. It is not just about the quantity of the links, but also about the quality. For example, a website with higher ranking contains about 4000 backlinks while a lower one may contain over 8000 backlinks. This is possibly because some of those 8000 links are auto-generated.
Usually, there are two types of auto- generated links:
1. Spamware generated links
2. Programs provided by some domains for automatically adding links
It states clearly in Google webmaster guidelines: “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”
Once your site has been detected by using auto-generated links, you may be penalized in the following ways:
1. No credit is given to auto-generated links.
2. Negatively affected on sites ranking
3. Removed from SERPs in some serious cases.
Therefore, to build a natural healthy website, you should focus on creating strong content and building natural links.
Lili
SEO Programmer
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
According to Hitwise, the internet analytics company, Google is slowly gaining popularity in the US, whilst other search engines are falling. Between July 07 and the same period last year www.google.com showed a 4.12% increase in traffic currently standing at 64.35%. Search engines like Yahoo (under search.yahoo.com) and Ask (under www.ask.com) stayed pretty much the same with a decrease of 0.41% and 0.08% respectively.
The biggest mover in a downwards direction, unsuprisingly, was from the Microsoft search engine msn.com with a drop of 2.98%. There is a footnote on the Hitwise site where they point out that the msn.com results are composed from searches on www.live.com, search.msn.com, and even some traffic from a promotion on club.live.com. So even though they have results composed from 3 different sites, as well as searches from search boxes inbedded into IE7, they still can’t get people to use their product. I think this proves which search engine is the better! I would be interested to see the search statistics for UK only search engines.
Hitwise use a different approach from normal analytics. If you haven’t heard of them before they don’t measure toolbar traffic (like Alexa) or on site traffic (like Google analytics) they monitor direct internet traffic via ISP networks. Therefore, there traffic analysis is probably a lot more reliable than Alexa, and doesn’t rely on secret on-site statistics .
Phil
Programmer, Research and Development
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
