Anchor text is the visible text in a hyperlink. Anchor text is weighted (ranked) highly in search engine algorithms, because the linked text is usually relevant to the landing page. The objective of search engines is to provide highly relevant search results; this is where anchor text helps, as the tendency is, more often than not, to hyperlink words relevant to the landing page.

Usually this is exploited by webmasters to procure high results in SERPS (search engine results pages). Google Bombing is possible through anchor text manipulation. Much has been written on anchor text which is available on the web today.

Although the search engines are well aware of anchor text manipulation, not much change can be expected in the SE algorithms in the near future because the brighter side of the picture cannot be overlooked: anchor text delivers relevance.

The latest changes in Google’s algorithm point towards discounting of websites in the SERPS which are involved in anchor text manipulation for higher rankings. Although there are no indications of this clause (of the latest Google patent) having been implemented, this could become a reality in the future.

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A Free For All link page (FFA) is a web page set up ostensibly to improve the search engine placement of a particular web site.

Webmasters typically will use placement software to place a link to their site on hundreds of FFA sites hoping that the resulting incoming links will increase the ranking of their site in search engines. Experts in search engine optimization techniques do not place much value on FFAs. First, most FFAs only maintain a small number of links for a short time, too short for most search engine crawls to pick them up. The high “human” traffic to FFA sites is almost completely other webmasters visiting the site to place their own links manually. Search engine algorithms do more than count link numbers, they also check relevancy which the unrelated links on FFA sites do not have. Another drawback to FFAs is the amount of spam webmasters will receive from the owners and paying members of the FFA. Using an FFA can be considered a form of spamdexing.

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Link Exchange (“Reciprocal Link Exchange”) is the practice of exchanging links with other websites. There are many different ways to arrange a link exchange with webmasters. The simplest way of doing it is to email another website owner and ask to do a link exchange. Also visiting webmaster discussion boards which offer a dedicated link exchange forum where webmasters can request a link exchange be it of a certain category or open to anybody. You place their link on your site, usually on a links page and the other site in return will place a link back to you.

Link exchange has been a long time practice by website owners since the beginning of the WWW. In the last few years (after year 2000), this practice has gained more popularity as search engines such as Google started favoring sites that had more links in the rankings. This system was very accurate at gauging the importance of a website when it first started, leading to the popularity of Google

However according to experts, search engines no longer place a heavy emphasis on reciprocal links. Instead the popularity or credibility of your site is now gauged by one way incoming links to your site. How than do you go about building one way back links to your site? There are a number of proven techniques you can follow:

1. First and foremost your aim should be to link to sites with a similar theme as your site. For example if you site is about “dogs” than it makes sense that back link from another dog or animal related site would be given a heavier weighting that a link from a casino site. You should start by conducting a search with you keywords on the major search engines (MSN, Yahoo, and Google) to come up with a list of sites which appear for that keyword. Next determine the contact info, ideally an e-mail address. Once you have this information, you can simply contact the webmaster (politely) and ask them if they would be willing to link to your site.

2. Another effective way of increasing your link popularity is to write and submit your articles to sites such as articlecity.com. The importance of this is that when you submit your material there is usually a resource box where you can enter the link information to your site. Every time someone publishes your article, you will have a one way link from their site to yours.

3. Submit to directories under the appropriate category. Many directories and human edited and therefore a link from a directory can instantly add credibility to your site. A major directory is Dmoz. Since site submissions are human reviewed, expect at least 6-8 weeks for any kind of response.

4. Submit your URL to link exchange directories where web users such as your self are actively looking to find new relevant link partners. If you search for google.com, ask.com or msn.com for terms: link exchange or link trade you will be able to find some good ones. Here are few that I have found: linkmarket.net, linkexchagned.com and linkpartners.com.

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Keyword density is the percentage of words on a web page that match a specified set of keywords. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase. Due to the ease of managing keyword density, search engines usually implement other measures of relevancy to prevent unscrupulous webmasters from creating search spam through practices such as keyword stuffing.

A webmaster who wants to maximize the value of a web site can read the guidelines published by the search engines, as well as the coding guidelines published by the World Wide Web Consortium. If the guidelines are followed, and the site presents frequently updated, useful, original content, and a few meaningful, useful inbound links are established, it is usually possible to obtain a significant amount of organic search traffic.

When a site has useful content, other webmasters will naturally place links to the site, increasing its PageRank and flow of visitors. When visitors discover a useful web site, they tend to refer other visitors by emailing or instant messaging links.

As a result, SEO practices that improve web site quality are likely to outlive short term practices that simply seek to manipulate search rankings. The top SEOs recommend targeting the same thing that search engines seek to promote: relevant, useful content for their users.

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Spamdexing is the promotion of irrelevant, chiefly commercial, pages through deceptive techniques and the abuse of the search algorithms. Many search engine administrators consider any form of search engine optimization used to improve a website’s page rank as spamdexing. However, over time a widespread consensus has developed in the industry as to what are and are not acceptable means of boosting one’s search engine placement and resultant traffic.

As search engines operate in a highly automated way it is often possible for webmasters to use methods and tactics not approved by search engines to gain better ranking. These methods often go unnoticed unless an employee from the search engine manually visits the site and notices the activity, or a change in ranking algorithm causes the site to lose the advantage thus gained. Sometimes a company will employ an SEO consultant to evaluate competitor’s sites, and report “unethical” optimization methods to the search engines.

Spamdexing often gets confused with legitimate search engine optimization techniques, which do not involve deceit. Spamming involves getting web sites more exposure than they deserve for their keywords, leading to unsatisfactory search results. Optimization involves getting web sites the rank they deserve on the most targeted keywords, leading to satisfactory search experiences.

When discovered, search engines may take action against those found to be using unethical SEO methods. In February 2006, Google removed both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of these practices.[1]

Legal issues

In 2002, search engine manipulator SearchKing filed suit in an Oklahoma court against the search engine Google. SearchKing’s claim was that Google’s tactics to prevent spamdexing constituted an unfair business practice. This may be compared to lawsuits which email spammers have filed against spam-fighters, as in various cases against MAPS and other DNSBLs. In January of 2003, the court pronounced a summary judgment in Google’s favor. [2]

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

New sites do not need to be “submitted” to search engines to be listed. A simple link from an established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and spider its contents. It is rarely more than a few days from the acquisition of the link to all the main search engine spiders visiting and indexing the new site.

Once the search engine has found the new site, it will generally visit and index all the pages on the site, as long as all the pages are linked to with standard <a href> hyperlinks. Pages which are accessible only through Flash or Javascript links may not be findable by the spiders.

Webmasters can instruct spiders to not index certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Standard practice requires a search engine to check this file upon visiting the domain. The web developer can use this feature to prevent pages such as shopping carts or other dynamic, user-specific content from appearing in search engine results.

For those search engines who have their own paid submission (like Yahoo), it may save some time to pay a nominal fee for submission.

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Google was started by two PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and brought a new concept to evaluating web pages. This concept, called PageRank, has been from the start important to the Google algorithm [1]. PageRank relies heavily on incoming links and uses the logic that each link to a page is a vote for that page’s value. The more incoming links a page had the more “worthy” it is. The value of each incoming link itself varies directly based on the PageRank of the page it comes from and inversely on the number of outgoing links on that page.

With help from PageRank, Google proved to be very good at serving relevant results. Google became the most popular and successful search engine. Because PageRank measured an off-site factor, Google felt it would be more difficult to manipulate than on-page factors.

But manipulated it was. Webmasters had already developed link manipulation tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine. These methods proved to be equally applicable to Google’s algorithm. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links on a massive scale. PageRank’s reliance on the link as a vote of confidence in a page’s value was undermined as many webmasters sought to garner links purely to influence Google into sending them more traffic, irrespective of whether the link was useful to human site visitors.

It was time for Google—and other search engines—to look at a wider range of off-site factors. There were other reasons to develop more intelligent algorithms. The Internet was reaching a vast population of non-technical users who were often unable to use advanced querying techniques to reach the information they were seeking and the sheer volume and complexity of the indexed data was vastly different from that of the early days. Search engines had to develop predictive, semantic, linguistic and heuristic algorithms.

A proxy for the PageRank metric is still displayed in the Google Toolbar, but PageRank is only one of more than 100 factors that Google considers in ranking pages.

Today, most search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret. A search engine may use hundreds of factors in ranking the listings on its SERPs; the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually.

Much current SEO thinking on what works and what doesn’t is largely speculation and informed guesses. Some SEOs have carried out controlled experiments to gauge the effects of different approaches to search optimization.

The following, though, are some of the considerations search engines could be building into their algorithms, and the list of Google patents [2] may give some indication as to what is in the pipeline:

• Age of site
• Length of time domain has been registered
• Age of content
• Regularity with which new content is added
• Age of link and reputation of linking site
• Standard on-site factors
• Negative scoring for on-site factors (for example, a dampening for sites with extensive keyword meta tags indicative of having being SEO-ed)
• Uniqueness of content
• Related terms used in content (the terms the search engine associates as being related to the main content of the page)
• Google Pagerank (Only used in Google’s algorithm)
• External links, the anchor text in those external links and in the sites/pages containing those links
• Citations and research sources (indicating the content is of research quality)
• Stem-related terms in the search engine’s database (finance/financing)
• Incoming backlinks and anchor text of incoming backlinks
• Negative scoring for some incoming backlinks (perhaps those coming from low value pages, reciprocated backlinks, etc.)
• Rate of acquisition of backlinks: too many too fast could indicate “unnatural” link buying activity
• Text surrounding outward links and incoming backlinks. A link following the words “Sponsored Links” could be ignored
• Use of “rel=nofollow” to suggest that the search engine should ignore the link
• Depth of document in site
• Metrics collected from other sources, such as monitoring how frequently users hit the back button when SERPs send them to a particular page
• Metrics collected from sources like the Google Toolbar, Google AdWords/Adsense programs, etc.
• Metrics collected in data-sharing arrangements with third parties (like providers of statistical programs used to monitor site traffic)
• Rate of removal of incoming links to the site
• Use of sub-domains, use of keywords in sub-domains and volume of content on sub-domains… and negative scoring for such activity
• Semantic connections of hosted documents
• Rate of document addition or change
• IP of hosting service and the number/quality of other sites hosted on that IP
• Other affiliations of linking site with the linked site (do they share an IP? have a common postal address on the “contact us” page?)
• Technical matters like use of 301 to redirect moved pages, showing a 404 server header rather than a 200 server header for pages that don’t exist, proper use of robots.txt
• Hosting uptime
• Whether the site serves different content to different categories of users (cloaking)
• Broken outgoing links not rectified promptly
• Unsafe or illegal content
• Quality of HTML coding, presence of coding errors
• Actual click through rates observed by the search engines for listings displayed on their SERPs
• Hand ranking by humans of the most frequently accessed SERPs

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

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SEO began in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a site to the various engines which would run spiders, programs to “crawl” the site, and store the collected data. The search engines then sorted the information by topic, and served results based on pages they had spidered. As the number of documents online kept growing, and more webmasters realized the value of organic search listings, so popular search engines began to sort their listings so they could display the most relevant pages first. This was the start of a search engine versus webmaster game that continues to this day.

At first search engines were guided by the webmasters themselves. Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as category and keyword meta tags. Meta tags provided a guide to each page’s content. When some webmasters began to abuse meta tags, causing their pages to rank for irrelevant searches, search engines abandoned their consideration of Meta tags and instead developed more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account factors that were more diverse, including:

• Text within the title tag
• Domain name
• URL directories and file names
• HTML tags: headings, bold and emphasized text
• Keyword density
• Keyword proximity
• Alt attributes for images
• Text within NOFRAMES tags

By relying so extensively on factors that were still within the webmasters’ exclusive control, search engines continued to suffer from abuse and ranking manipulation. In order to provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their SERPs showed the most relevant search results, rather than useless pages stuffed with keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. This led to the rise of a new kind of search engine.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.