Home - Understand and Fine Tune
Gain top results by fine tuning your SEO efforts.
As discussed in optimizing for SEO, most success with organic search comes from building an informative, genuine site. When SEO practices became popular in the mid 1990's, many search engines relied on keyword meta tags and the general idea that a given site was about whatever a site owner or SEO tech told them the site was about. As many began abusing this power of trust, search companies began developing more sophisticated software and filter techniques to choose more informative sites for common keyword matches. In a nutshell, imagine this topic of being where the nice guy finishes first. Search filter practices commonly include more than just content analysis. When crawling a site, search robots will analyze outbound and inbound links, no follow links, and they will analyze and compare the relevance of these links. For instance when a car site links to a mountain climbing site, google would view this as an obvious attempt of improving search ranks by use of an irrelevant link exchange. Another common mistake with outbound links is linking to any and all relevant sites. Outbound links should be chosen very carefully as blacklisted sites can damage your own search rank. Blacklisted sites are ones that have abused search engine guidelines and have been penalized and/or purged from a given index completely. You cannot stop these sites from linking to yours but you can identify them and choose not to link back. An easy way of identifying this type of site is by conducting a search for the given site's exact address. If the site does show up first or is low or missing from the search result, odds are the site has been blacklisted. Avoid linking to sites that do not return links, have no outbound links, or possess only no follow links. An article on seochat refers to these as black hole sites. This will not hurt your SEO but will not help your efforts anyway. Most no follow links are used in an effort to reduce spam on open sites such as news and media sites. In the case where one or few of these sites are used in reference, an outbound link could be considered. In general try to avoid not returning returning links or using no follow links for quality, relevant sites which link to yours. The act of this can cause your site to recieve less inbound links as well as not improving your search rank. Also, use comparison with top sites which are relevant to yours to improve content quality and user friendliness of your site. If you feel your site has improved and provides quality, usefull content, most search engines provide a reconsideration tool. Use this tool if your site has been updated and/or improved and still does poorly in search results. For google, this tool is located in your webmaster tools account.
Related Articles and Definitions:
content analysis, outbound link, inbound link, no follow link, blacklisted sites, black hole sites, open sites, search rank, site reconsideration
Resources and Related Links:
1. http://www.cms.ubc.ca/support/selfhelptools/contentanalysis.html
2. http://www.abcseo.com/seo-book/outbound-links.htm
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlink
4. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/good-times-with-inbound-links.html
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
6. http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/SEO-Strategies-A-Guide-to-Which-Ideas-Work-and-Which-Ones-Dont/
7. http://www.scriptol.com/seo/black-hole-site.php
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
9. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35843
10. http://www.userdrivenchange.com/filing-a-website-reconsideration-what-should-you-look-for
As discussed in optimizing for SEO, most success with organic search comes from building an informative, genuine site. When SEO practices became popular in the mid 1990's, many search engines relied on keyword meta tags and the general idea that a given site was about whatever a site owner or SEO tech told them the site was about. As many began abusing this power of trust, search companies began developing more sophisticated software and filter techniques to choose more informative sites for common keyword matches. In a nutshell, imagine this topic of being where the nice guy finishes first. Search filter practices commonly include more than just content analysis. When crawling a site, search robots will analyze outbound and inbound links, no follow links, and they will analyze and compare the relevance of these links. For instance when a car site links to a mountain climbing site, google would view this as an obvious attempt of improving search ranks by use of an irrelevant link exchange. Another common mistake with outbound links is linking to any and all relevant sites. Outbound links should be chosen very carefully as blacklisted sites can damage your own search rank. Blacklisted sites are ones that have abused search engine guidelines and have been penalized and/or purged from a given index completely. You cannot stop these sites from linking to yours but you can identify them and choose not to link back. An easy way of identifying this type of site is by conducting a search for the given site's exact address. If the site does show up first or is low or missing from the search result, odds are the site has been blacklisted. Avoid linking to sites that do not return links, have no outbound links, or possess only no follow links. An article on seochat refers to these as black hole sites. This will not hurt your SEO but will not help your efforts anyway. Most no follow links are used in an effort to reduce spam on open sites such as news and media sites. In the case where one or few of these sites are used in reference, an outbound link could be considered. In general try to avoid not returning returning links or using no follow links for quality, relevant sites which link to yours. The act of this can cause your site to recieve less inbound links as well as not improving your search rank. Also, use comparison with top sites which are relevant to yours to improve content quality and user friendliness of your site. If you feel your site has improved and provides quality, usefull content, most search engines provide a reconsideration tool. Use this tool if your site has been updated and/or improved and still does poorly in search results. For google, this tool is located in your webmaster tools account.
Related Articles and Definitions:
content analysis, outbound link, inbound link, no follow link, blacklisted sites, black hole sites, open sites, search rank, site reconsideration
Resources and Related Links:
1. http://www.cms.ubc.ca/support/selfhelptools/contentanalysis.html
2. http://www.abcseo.com/seo-book/outbound-links.htm
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlink
4. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/good-times-with-inbound-links.html
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
6. http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/SEO-Strategies-A-Guide-to-Which-Ideas-Work-and-Which-Ones-Dont/
7. http://www.scriptol.com/seo/black-hole-site.php
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
9. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35843
10. http://www.userdrivenchange.com/filing-a-website-reconsideration-what-should-you-look-for
