Are You SEO Friendly?

Mar
16

Cloaking

Sometimes, a webmaster might program the server
in such a way that it returns different content
to Google than it returns to regular users, which
is often done to misrepresent search engine
rankings.

This process is referred to as cloaking as it
conceals the actual website and returns distorted
web pages to search engines crawling the site.
This can mislead users about what they’ll find
when they click on a search result. Google highly
disapproves of any such practice and might place
a ban on the website which is found guilty of
cloaking.

Google Guidelines

Here are some of the important tips and tricks
that can be employed while dealing with Google.

Do’s

• A website should have crystal clear hierarchy
and links and should preferably be easy to
navigate.
• A site map is required to help the users go
around your site and in case the site map has
more than 100 links, then it is advisable to
break it into several pages to avoid clutter.
• Come up with essential and precise keywords
and make sure that your website features
relevant and informative content.
• The Google crawler will not recognize text
hidden in the images, so when describing
important names, keywords or links; stick with
plain text.
• The TITLE and ALT tags should be descriptive
and accurate and the website should have no
broken links or incorrect HTML.
• Dynamic pages (the URL consisting of a ‘?’
character) should be kept to a minimum as not
every search engine spider is able to crawl
them.
• The robots.txt file on your web server should
be current and should not block the Googlebot
crawler. This file tells crawlers which
directories can or cannot be crawled.

Don’ts

• When making a site, do not cheat your users,
i.e. those people who will surf your website.
Do not provide them with irrelevant content or
present them with any fraudulent schemes.
• Avoid tricks or link schemes designed to
increase your site’s ranking.
• Do not employ hidden texts or hidden links.
• Google frowns upon websites using cloaking
technique. Hence, it is advisable to avoid that.
• Automated queries should not be sent to Google.
• Avoid stuffing pages with irrelevant words and
content. Also don’t create multiple pages,
sub-domains, or domains with significantly
duplicate content.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search
engines or other “cookie cutter” approaches
such as affiliate programs with hardly any
original content.

Crawler/Spider Considerations

Also, consider technical factors. If a site has
a slow connection, it might time-out for the
crawler. Very complex pages, too, may time out
before the crawler can harvest the text.

If you have a hierarchy of directories at your
site, put the most important information high,
not deep. Some search engines will presume that
the higher you placed the information, the more
important it is. And crawlers may not venture
deeper than three or four or five directory
levels.

Above all remember the obvious – full-text search
engines such index text. You may well be tempted
to use fancy and expensive design techniques that
either block search engine crawlers or leave your
pages with very little plain text that can be
indexed. Don’t fall prey to that temptation.

Ranking Rules Of Thumb

The simple rule of thumb is that content counts,
and that content near the top of a page counts
for more than content at the end. In particular,
the HTML title and the first couple lines of text
are the most important part of your pages. If the
words and phrases that match a query happen to
appear in the HTML title or first couple lines
of text of one of your pages, chances are very
good that that page will appear high in the list
of search results.

A crawler/spider search engine can base its
ranking on both static factors (a computation
of the value of page independent of any
particular query) and query-dependent factors.

Values

1 Long pages, which are rich in meaningful text
(not randomly generated letters and words).

2 Pages that serve as good hubs, with lots of
links to pages that that have related content
(topic similarity, rather than random meaningless
links, such as those generated by link exchange
programs or intended to generate a false
impression of “popularity”).

3 The connectivity of pages, including not just
how many links there are to a page but where the
links come from: the number of distinct domains
and the “quality” ranking of those particular
sites. This is calculated for the site and also
for individual pages. A site or a page is “good”
if many pages at many different sites point to
it, and especially if many “good” sites point to
it.

4 The level of the directory in which the page
is found. Higher is considered more important.
If a page is buried too deep, the crawler simply
won’t go that far and will never find it.

These static factors are recomputed about once a
week, and new good pages slowly percolate upward
in the rankings. Note that there are advantages
to having a simple address and sticking to it,
so others can build links to it, and so you know
that it’s in the index

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