Hurricane's Hints

Everything you always wanted to know about Web Design, PhotoShop and Flash .... but refused to buy the book! A collection of helpful hints, tips and tricks for creating stunning computer graphics and keeping your computer running smooth.

Sunday, September 02, 2007

How Does Yahoo Define Spam?

Webpages “that are considered unwanted and appear in search results with the intent to deceive or attract clicks, with little regard for relevance or overall quality of the user experience.” Officially, Yahoo! does not want to index sites with:

  • Text that is hidden from the user
  • Misuse of competitor names/products
  • Pages that have substantially the same content as other pages
  • Multiple sites offering the same content
  • Pages in great quantity, which are automatically generated or of little value
  • Pages dedicated to redirecting the user to another page
  • Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end-user sees
  • Pages built primarily for search engines
  • Pages that use excessive pop-ups, interfering with user navigation
  • Pages that use methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking
  • Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames
  • Excessive cross-linking with sites to inflate a site's apparent popularity
  • Pages that harm the accuracy, diversity, or relevance of search results
  • Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent, or provide a poor user experience

Hurricane Graphics - Search Engine Freindly Website Design and Search Engine Optimization

How Does Google Define Spam?

The Google Webmaster Guidelines specifically state that the following techniques may lead them to remove your site from the Google index:

  • Hidden text or hidden links.
  • Cloaking or sneaky redirects.
  • Automated queries to Google.
  • Pages loaded with irrelevant keywords.
  • Multiple pages, subdomains / domains with substantially duplicate content.
  • "Doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter“ approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

Hurricane Graphics - Website Optimization for Better Search Engine Ranking

How Do Search Engines Work?

In the simplest of terms, search engines run automated programs, called "bots" or "spiders" that follow the links on your website to "crawl" from page to page and analyze the text content in order to determine what each page is about. The content is "indexed" and stored in a giant database of documents that makes up a search engine's "index". When a request for information comes into the search engine, it retrieves from its index all the documents that match the query.

The goal of any search engine optimization effort is to try to get the pages of your site to show up within the first two or three pages of search results. The exact rules or algorithms the search engines use to determine which pages rank the highest are constantly changing and held as closely guarded secrets to insure the quality and relevance of the search engine results pages (SERPS).

Hurricane Graphics - Custom Website Design and Search Engine Optimization Services