SEO Beware of the dark side - Computerworld

[i0love0u]

Computerworld - Being at the top of a search engine results page can mean the difference between business success and failure. So, what would you do to ensure a listing there?

Absolutely anything?

If so, you could be walking into a minefield.

Search engine optimization (known as SEO) involves actions intended to get your page listed higher on a search engine results page. In the past 15 years,miu miu bags sale, SEO has evolved into a complex art, one that is now the foundation of many businesses.

The problem is that there are ways of trying to improve your standing that are considered legitimate by the search engine companies like Google,miu miu spring 2011 bags, but there are also methods that can get you into trouble. Google (which receives 90% of the world's search engine traffic, according to StatCounter,messenger bags for men nyc, and 65.4% of the U.S. market, according to comScore) does not appreciate being gamed -- and will retaliate.

Just ask $17 billion retailer J.C. Penney,miu miu spring 2011 handbags, which got caught using black-hat (i.e., illegitimate) methods to boost its search results during the 2010 holiday shopping season. Penney was accused of taking part in a so-called link scheme, probably the most complicated black-hat SEO technique.

"Our high [search engine result] rankings were pushed down," Darcie Brossart,cross body bags for men, Penney's vice president of communications in Plano, Texas,miu miu bags price, confirmed concerning the sanctions Google imposed. "We have terminated our relationship with our former natural SEO firm. We don't know how it happened. We did not authorize it, and we were not involved."

It's important to recognize if your SEO firm (or your in-house Web expert) is venturing too close to the edge of the black-hat cliff -- because if Google or other search engines find there is some hanky-panky happening, it's your site that will suffer. "I'm not saying everyone is doing it,cloth cross body bags for juniors, but it's not unusual,mini crossbody bags," says Vanessa Fox, former Google Search employee and author of Marketing in the Age of Google. "A company might hire an SEO firm without knowing a lot about SEO,miu miu bags 2011 collection, or they might think it's not risky,womens crossbody bags," she adds. (Google publishes advice for those considering hiring SEO firms.)

A good grounding in what the major search engines do and don't consider acceptable can help companies avoid these issues. What follows are some of the techniques that are considered legitimate -- and not so legitimate -- and how you can tell the difference.

But first, let's take a quick look at how Google ranks sites.
Google's secret sauce
The foundation of Google's trademarked site-ranking technique, called PageRank,crossbody bags under 50, is links, explains spokesman Jake Hubert. PageRank is based on the number of outside Web pages that link to a page,designer leather messenger bags for women, the number of pages that link to those pages,crossbody bags for teens, and so on.

But while links remain a major consideration in PageRank ratings,miu miu bags replica, Google's techniques have evolved since the search engine was launched in 1997. The company now ranks pages with an algorithm that has about 200 factors, Hubert says. These factors are adjusted on a daily basis; he says he counted about 500 changes in the past year.

Further details about the algorithm are not made public,miu miu bags price, Hubert says. A public version of an individual page's PageRank rating is displayed by Google Toolbar. However,miu miu bags sale philippines, those ratings sometimes need to be taken with a grain of salt,miu miu bags australia, as we'll see later in the story.

At Bing,authentic miu miu bags, a Microsoft spokesman would only say that the site uses upwards of a thousand signals when deciding search results ranking,miu miu bags 2011 collection, and that the nature and weight of the signals are constantly being adjusted. Meanwhile,messenger bags for men, Yahoo Search has announced that it will use the Bing search engine.

Because the algorithms remain a closely guarded secret, many white-hat SEO techniques focus on the known element -- links -- and are aimed at getting other sites with high PageRank ratings to link to lower-ranked sites.