Website Ranking

During the years that the web was emerging, numerous sites that have industry-specific content were continuously being added to the web daily. Web surfers or searchers had very few tools to locate these sites which they knew existed but had no idea on how they can be accessed. The birth of Yahoo provided some relief as it organized its directory listing by classifying each site it discovered and likewise embedded a search engine in its site. This started the use of keywords existing in the database for site searching. Other search engines followed suit with the search trend and relied heavily on Meta tags to classify the relevance of a website based on keywords found in the tags.

Everything seemed to work out just fine until site owners and webmasters realized the potential of embedding industry specific keyword phrases in their Meta tags and other site codes to manipulate higher rankings in search results. Search engines started getting cluttered with sites that spammed their content with the abuse of relevant keywords. Most had the keywords but had poor content. The credibility and relevance of search engines were being challenged so they had to think of a way to offer a more refined output to users.

Google saw the problem which conventional search engines had to face in this situation. It recognized the fact that as long as the control of relevance remained with webmasters, the ranking results would continue to be contaminated with the presence of high ranking sites that artificially inflate their keyword relevance. By the very nature of the web, it is accepted that the web is based on hyperlinks where a site is largely measured by its linkage to prominent sites and the number of links it has. There is the assumption that a site is good and important if more sites link to it.

The Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page took this logic further when they formulated a search engine algorithm that shifted the ranking weight to off-page factors. They came up with a formula called the PageRank where the algorithm would count the number of sites that link to a page and assign it an importance score on a scale of 1-10. The Google scale is not linear but rather exponential in nature.

The PageRank algorithm which was named after its founder, Larry Page, was deployed with the launch of Google in 1998. The successful result enabled Google to surpass its competition due to the superior and relevant results it was able to serve using their formula that was difficult to manipulate. The new algorithm helped in providing authentic and quality information while presenting a challenge to site owners and webmasters who cheat their way to top rank. Google’s PageRank is considered one of the primary off-page factors that influence a page’s ranking in the search engine result pages. The PageRank value of any page can be checked by downloading the Google Toolbar.

Google’s PageRank

PageRank is explained by Google in the following manner:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. But Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”. Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.”

The exact algorithm of each search engine is a confidential matter. However, search engine analysts believe that ranking is a product of a combination of page relevance and PageRank. The search results of Google search are admittedly high in terms of relevance. This is largely responsible for the resounding success it is experiencing. Other major search engines have adapted this logic in some form with variations on the assigned importance of this value.

The Google Toolbar is downloaded for free and can be installed in the user’s Internet Explorer within minutes. It facilitates the display of the PageRank of each web page visited on a scale of 1-10. It does not display the PageRank of web pages that it has not indexed. The PageRank displayed by the Toolbar refers to individual pages and not to the site as a whole.

Most search engines place significant importance on link popularity in evaluating the importance of web pages ranking and indexing purposes. The system of Link Popularity is based on the number and quality of links connected to a website page. This is used in conjunction with the quality of sites that are linked to the website, the quality of content and the industry relevance to the site.

A webpage that links to one site passes a portion of its own PageRank value in the process. The higher the PageRank of the linking page, the higher the value passed. PageRank is divided over the total outgoing links of the linking page. In essence, a link from a PR10 webpage with 20 outgoing links represents more value than a link with a page of the same PageRank that has 100 outgoing links. Pursuing links from higher PR web pages with lesser number of total outgoing links should be prioritized.

One of the more critical aspects of search engine marketing is the building of link popularity. The manipulation of PageRank is neither easy nor recommended but PageRank can be enhanced by improving link popularity. A long term link building campaign should be undertaken to boost a site’s PageRank and consequently achieve a significant improvement in site ranking. Off-page factors continue to gain importance in ranking websites thus it has become necessary to actively boost such factors to favor the website. Exchanging links with sites falling under the same industry segment has become more open as webmasters finally realize the importance of link popularity and PageRank.

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Google’s Matt Cutts gave an interview in which he revealed some things that will help webmasters to better optimize their websites.

Matt Cutts joined Google as a Software Engineer in January 2000. Before Google, he was working on his Ph.D. in computer graphics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has an M.S. from UNC-Chapel Hill, and B.S. degrees in both mathematics and computer science from the University of Kentucky.

Matt wrote SafeSearch, which is Google’s family filter. In addition to his experience at Google, Matt held a top-secret clearance while working for the Department of Defense, and he’s also worked at a game engine company. He claims that Google is the most fun by far.
You can check at http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-012510.shtml

Here are the most  important things that Matt Cutts said in the interview:

1. The more relevant links you have, the more pages of your site will be indexed

Matt Cutts said that the number of pages that Google indexes from your website is roughly proportional to the PageRank of your website. That means that more pages of your website will be indexed if your website has many inbound links.



Google does not have an indexation cap, i.e. they will index all pages of your website if you have enough inbound links. Remember that the PageRank that Google uses in its ranking algorithm is not the PageRank that is displayed in Google’s toolbar.

2. Slow servers can cause problems

If Google can only crawl two pages at any given time due to a slow server, Google can set some sort of upper bound on how many pages they will fetch from that host server. This can be a problem for websites that are hosted on shared or slow servers.

3. Duplicate content can cause problems

“Imagine we crawl three pages from a site, and then we discover that the two other pages were duplicates of the third page. We’ll drop two out of the three pages and keep only one, and that?s why it looks like it has less good content.”

As mentioned above, Google will index your web pages based on the PageRank of your pages. If you have duplicate content, some pages of your website will be discarded and you’ll waste ranking opportunities.

Matt Cutts also indicated that if you link from one page to a duplicate page, you can mess up your PageRank. Google also tries to pass the PageRank and other link signals from the duplicate pages to the original page.

If you use the rel=canonical tag on your web pages then the pages needn’t be exact duplicates but they should be conceptual duplicates of the same product, or things that are closely related.

“It’s totally fine for a page to link to itself with rel=canonical, and it’s also totally fine, at least with Google, to have rel=canonical on every page on your site.”

However, Google does not always obey the canonical tag:

“The crawling and indexing team wants to reserve the ultimate right to determine if the site owner is accidentally shooting themselves in the foot and not listen to the rel=canonical tag.”

4. Affiliate pages don’t get high rankings

If a website is an affiliate website that is very similar to other pages (only with a different logo, etc.) then this page won’t get high rankings.

If Google detects an affiliate link than this link won’t pass any PageRank power.

5. Redirects work but they don’t pass the whole PageRank

If you change your domain name and redirect old pages with a 301 redirect from your old page to your new page then the link power will be passed to your new domain name but the overall power of the links will decrease. 301 redirects do not pass the full PageRank.

6. Low quality pages can cause problems

“If there are a large number of pages that we consider low value, then we might not crawl quite as many pages from that site, but that is independent of rel=canonical.”

If you have a lot of web pages with thin content then Google might stop crawling your website. Matt Cutts also suggested that it might help to be wordy:

“You really want to have most of your pages have actual products with lots of text on them.”

7. PageRank sculpting and website navigation

Google does not want you to sculpt your website for PageRank reasons. The best way to pass link power from one page to other pages is to have a good website navigation.

“Site architecture, how you make links and structure appear on a page in a way to get the most people to the products that you want them to see, is really a better way to approach it then trying to do individual sculpting of PageRank on links.”

“You can distribute that PageRank very carefully between related products, and use related links straight to your product pages rather than into your navigation. I think there are ways to do that without necessarily going towards trying to sculpt PageRank.”

8. You still shouldn’t use JavaScript links for your website navigation

“For a while, we were scanning within JavaScript, and we were looking for links. Google has gotten smarter about JavaScript and can execute some JavaScript.

I wouldn’t say that we execute all JavaScript, so there are some conditions in which we don?t execute JavaScript.

We do have the ability to execute a large fraction of JavaScript when we need or want to. One thing to bear in mind if you are advertising via JavaScript is that you can use NoFollow on JavaScript links.”

9. Google does not like paid links

Matt Cutts said they Google doesn’t want advertisements to affect search engine rankings.

They might put out a call for people to report more about link spam in the coming months. Matt Cutts said that Google “does a lot of stuff” to try to detect ads and make sure that they don’t unduly affect search engines.

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Introduction to Sandbox

For a considerably long period, Google happened to provide new sites with a temporary boost, known as “fresh boost” or “new site bonus.” But recently this search giant seems to have set a new trend in place for Search Engine Page Rankings (SEPRs). It was found that that Google SERPs of brand new sites turned out to be pretty pathetic after the initial glorious days at the top of the search rankings. This phenomenon is popularly referred to as Google’s Sandbox.

Google’s Sandbox is like a quicksand

Though “Sandbox” sounds pretty pleasant, it very much resembles a quicksand than a playground as suggested by its name to many web professionals.

When a new website is indexed in Google, it gets propelled to the top of the SERPs charts for a short yet glorious time, and then, slides downhill only to be buried deeply in the sand at Google. In other words, Google’s Sandbox is about a brand new website being placed on probation, or a hiatus or in a moratorium and kept lower than expected in searches, before being given full value for its incoming links and content.

How does it affect the website?

The Google’s Sandbox is said to be a filter placed on new websites to discourage spam sites from rising quickly, getting banned, and repeating the process. Websites in the Sandbox does not receive good rankings for its most important keywords and keyword phrases. The new website will be there in the result pages, but it does not rank well no matter how much original, well optimized the content is and how many quality inbound links the site does have.

Which sorts of websites are vulnerable to be mired in the Sandbox?

While all types of sites can be placed in the Sandbox barring a few exceptions. The problem appears grave for new websites seeking rankings for highly competitive keyword phrases. More competitive keyword driven Websites seeking rankings in highly competitive searches are likely to be in for a much longer duration.

How long does a site remain buried in the Sandbox?

Sites in the Sandbox varies from one to six months, with three to four months being the average stay time frame. It has been observed that less competitive searches are given the much shorter stay, whereas hyper-competitive keywords often get sojourn in the sand for six months. The most frequent time of burial is said to be about three months for most search terms.



What distinguishes sites trapped in sand and a Google’s penalty?

Sandbox is a Google-only event. Many folks while they see good rankings in Yahoo and MSN Search of their sites mistakenly believe that they have triggered a Google penalty. However this is generally not the case in point.

Sites penalized by Google do not appear in the Google search engine results pages for even the less important searches. Moreover, sites which have invited the wrath of Google show no page rank, and have a grey bar on the Google Toolbar. And none is true in case of sites mired in the Sandbox.

Google’s Sandbox: Letting website grow to its natural evolution

Google is looking ahead for Websites that offer quality content. It is an effort to prevent spammers from creating web sites that are just a flash in the pan, and to discourage the violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines which was not an exception in the past, to say the least.

Google’s Sandbox has deliberately been instituted to put a check on the use of throw away spam sites to build early traffic, and to slow down the purchase of expired domain names, among other things.

Google continues to strive that its ranking algorithm, inbound links, original content rich with keywords, and the use of anchor text are not tampered with for a short term gain severely affecting its credibility and quality standards. This stand is driven by the vision of Google that Website should grow gradually to its natural evolution.

Getting grounds before getting grounded in Sandbox

Getting grounded in the Sandbox is almost near-universal for sites. So, it is the best to be prepared for the eventuality. Planning ahead to be buried in the Sandbox may lessen the damage, using the time to your best advantage. To keep the Sandbox filter from causing severe harm to your online, and even your offline business, employ the following strategies:

- The sojourn in the sand may be cut short to a degree by purchasing and sending live a website, before it is ready for prime time.

- Make it sure that you add as many incoming links as possible to get keep on adding content to your site. Do anything but increase your site’s appearance on the Interner

- Purchase and register a domain name and park it. By so doing, some of the sand time will be run through the Google hourglass, before your site is ready for launch. In the meantime, you can be preparing content when your site goes public

- Plan the time of your website launch to have the Sandbox time period passed off when your site needs high search engines rankings the most. Plan for entering the Sandbox by putting your site live at least three months earlier than expected.

Rising from the moratorium: Key strategies that really works!

All your apprehension and concern apart, your stay in the Sandbox is simply an excellent opportunity to improve upon your site, and enrich it the way Google will never ever refute to accept in the top rankings. You can dig in the sand to carve out a niche in your site optimisation.

Here’s how you embark on…

- Use the time in the quicksand to add incoming links to your website whilst you are in Sandbox. Better still, if you can employ a link exchange strategy right at this time.

- Reach out to useful directories as good sources of one-way links, additional Page Rank, and potential visitor traffic. Submitting to the various Internet directories, including The Open Directory Project, is quite advantageous in the long term

- Design and develop promotional and marketing strategies for your website to raise and maintain traffic levels during your hibernation in the sand.

- Building a community, or building strong inbound links through partnerships pays better off. If you establish traffic sources outside of search engines, you will see a welcome increase in your traffic levels once you get out of Sandbox.

- When you got trapped in Google’s sand, you may put aside a budget for an Adwords Program, i.e., Google’s pay per click advertising program. This will, of course, help you out in getting exposed and promoted on Google as well as many search and contextual partner sites

- Prefer not to discount traffic from other search engines such as Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and MSN, all of which do not seem to have any type of Sandbox. It may work pretty fine because sites that have well “on the page” search engine optimization do very well in these engines.

What do you need the most while in hiatus? Right Strategy Mix, Time and Patience

The Sandbox is not something you are eventually doomed to. It is not the ringing of death knell for your site either. It is not aimed to hold you back from succeeding.

Time and patience are your best friends while faced with this predicament providing that you execute the right strategy mix. You may not need to pull all the hair out of your head. Adding some powerful incoming links, with strong link anchor text, and adding relevant and rich keyword, and fresh content will help your site rise from the Sandbox, sooner than the later.

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Google Sandbox

No one really knows for sure about that but the point is:
- Links pointing to your site gain more value the longer they are pointed at your site. Therefore, since new sites will only have new links, they will be in the sandbox by default while their links “age”.
- After a site is first indexed by Google a sandbox clock is triggered. Variables like content update frequency, site category, and quality of links pointing to your site will change the length of time you are in the sandbox.

Google Banned

- Cloaking

Cloaking is when you put text and links into the html of your web pages which is hidden from your human visitors, usually by making it the same colour as the background of your page. Hidden text tends to be stuffed with keywords (often, they are random but popular ones) in the hopes that people searching for “sex”, “drugs” and “rock ‘n’ roll” will stumble across this site on their quest.

Cloaking is a waste of time. Search engines are wise to it, and it will annoy your visitors too, because highlighting the visible text on your page will result in them finding your dirty secret as well.

- Over-Enthusiastic Keyword Usage

You’ve been told that search engines like text with lots of keywords, so you write a page of keywords and post it on your site, somewhere you hope your human readers won’t find it. Wrong. Firstly, if it’s not linked well to the rest of your site, Google won’t take much notice of it anyway, and secondly, too many keywords is worse than too few: it can result in a blacklisting.



The best solution is to write good quality, unique, keyword-rich copy that your human visitors will be interested in, with a keyword ratio of approximately 3%. Remember that Google is trying to find its human searchers the best possible results for their query. It is trying to match human needs. So writing good, human-friendly copy is a good idea, and don’t bust a gut trying to get exactly 3%; all the search engines favour different ratios, and it doesn’t really matter that much anyway. Just try to achieve a good balance.

- Too Much, Too Fast

You decide that you need to start optimising your website for search engines, so you post a vast quantity of keyword-rich material (mostly lifted from free article sites) in one day. This is not wise; Google makes a note of the growth of sites, and if your site gets bigger too quickly, they’ll suspect you of spamming them. Release your material slowly, and if possible, write it yourself or get a freelancer to write it: search engines much prefer unique content to content which appears on dozens of sites.

Automatically generated, “cookie cutter” pages are also a bad idea. Hundreds of useless pages will not charm the search engines.

- Duplicate Material

You’ve written a really good article for your site, full of keywords and very interesting and relevant to your visitors. You then post it in three different places on your site. Again, not a good idea. Google likes fresh, unique content. It will notice if you repeat yourself, and penalise you accordingly.

- FFA Pages and Excessive Cross-Linking

You’ve heard that links into your site will assist in your search engine rankings, so you do a link swap with a free-for-all page, where hundreds of people submit their links to be listed on a single page in return for a link back to the site. Well, for a start, you’ve wasted your time: a link from a page with hundreds of unrelated links on it is virtually worthless. But worse still, you have probably got your site blacklisted. Google doesn’t penalise you for who links to you, because you can’t help that, but they will ban you for linking to a link farm page, and it is notoriously difficult to get reinstated after such an offence.

Joining link schemes is similarly a waste of time and money; having your site linked to and from hundreds of other unrelated sites will not improve your page rank, and could get you banned by Google, Yahoo! and others.

- Phishing

Phishing is an illegal activity whereby a site is set up which looks a lot like a secure legitimate site, such as a bank or credit card company login page. The site is then used to farm unsuspecting visitors’ bank and contact details, fooling them into thinking they are simply logging in as usual or changing their password. Google bans phishing sites whenever it finds them.

- Doorway Pages

A doorway page is a page made especially for search engines (and hence not for human visitors). It is designed in such a way that no human visitor will ever see it, and it contains keyword-rich copy, or even just a list of keywords. Some webmasters, knowing that different search engines have different algorithms, make separate doorway pages for each search engine. There is even software that can generate pages which the different search engines are supposed to like.

Generally speaking, doorway pages are a bad idea. Most search engines prohibit their use and will ban you if they find you out. The use of these pages is particularly unacceptable if the keywords you use in the doorway page are not related to the content of your site. What’s more, these pages clutter up search engines with nonsense and make it harder for everyone to find what they’re looking for.

- Repeatedly Submitting Your Site

Once you’ve submitted your site to search engines (which is rarely necessary at all; usually your site will be indexed naturally, if there are any other existing indexed pages linked to it), you don’t need to do it again. Resubmitting might not get you banned, but it will certainly annoy the search engines, and it won’t do you any good. In fact, some believe that submitting your site actually reduces your chances of a high page ranking.

- Numerous Virtual Hostnames

A virtual hostname is an additional hostname that redirects to your site’s actual hostname. Sometimes these can be used legitimately, as when you have a long URL that is difficult to remember, and so register a Domain Name which redirects to your site which is easier for your customers to remember and type. Having dozens of them, however, is misleading, and the search engines will not be impressed.

- Illegal Material

Illegal pornography, and other illegal material, will be banned from Google and other search engines as soon as it is found, no questions asked.

How To Make This Right

Nefarious techniques for boosting search engine rankings are, in the long term, a waste of time: they may produce a fast result, but it won’t last for long, and you might even find yourself banned, which can be devastating.

A few pointers to be going on with:

- Content is the key factor that search engines take into account. Good quality, unique, keyword-rich copy is your best bet. Not only will it attract the search engine spiders, but your real-life visitors will be more likely to return to read more.

- Update regularly. Give your human and electronic visitors something to come back for; new content is attractive.

- Links popularity to your website are also important. Consider swapping links with complementary websites (such as businesses which offer a related service but which aren’t direct competitors). Don’t link to sites that you wouldn’t touch if search engines didn’t exist. Forums and message boards are also valuable places to post links to your site, but don’t spam them – make friends, take part in the community, and absorb valuable advice while you’re there.

Important Think you must do:

Re-optimise your site for the search engines by removing any offending content and links and immerse yourself in obtaining more relevant inbound links

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