Violations That Could Affect Your Website's Google Search Engine Ranking

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SEO or the Search Engine Optimization is a process of improving a website's or webpage's visibility to search engines and searchers via organic or algorithmic search result. With different techniques used in search engine optimization, a website gets credibility and high ranking status in search engines. And sometimes, with the desire to push a website to obtain a top rank, some owners and SEO experts tend to go too far resorting to different types of violations.

Keyword Stuffing

This is also reffered to as keyword loading or spamdexing. It is the filling up of a webpage with keywords to manipulate the website's ranking and is considered as an unethical technique used in search engine optimizations. Often this is in the form of “hidden texts” or can be hidden in alt attributes or possibly inside the title tags and this could become one factor of prohibiting a site to reach the highest rank. That is why it is important for owners or SEO experts to review their website. One should focus on creating a content which is useful and informative and uses keywords appropriately and should be in context.

Thin Content

Website's content has become an important factor in determining the authority and visibility of a site in the eyes of search engines. A site may be conbsidered of having a thin contents if the website has insuffucient amount of characters or words, low quality content, too long, to vague, or has duplicate phrases, or doesn't follow langguage rules. Today google has equated content with quality. This means that more words means the site is of better quality and cannot be considered under thin content. Of course, the ideal amount of content varies but now the standard for a good rule of thumb is atleast 500 words per page.

Cloaking

Cloaking happens when a searcher visits a site and that visitor can only see one page but when a search crawler visits the site, it sees a better and more relevant optimized site. Cloaking is often used to trick search engines that is why they became strict with page cloaking that if get caught, your site could be penalized or worse be delisted. Aside from using it as a cheat, it is also used by other companies to hide their website's source codes but since search engines doesn't want cloaking it is not advisable for any website to use it if they are after with their website ranking.

Paid Links

Search engines like google uses links to determine the reputation of a site. And a website's rank is based partly on analysis of sites that has a link to it. Analysis based on links is a useful way of determining the website's value, and has helped in improving the quality of a web search. According to the Webmaster Guidelines of Google, buying and selling of links that passes PageRank is a violation and can have a negative inpact on the site's rank. So Google introduced the use of the nofollow tag as a disclosure for paid links, in order for these links not to get credits in search engine results.

Equipped with proper knowledge and obedience in following the guidelines can bring your website to your anicipated ranking in no time. It is always best to be cautious and careful in optimizing our sites.