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Attention Readers! There's still time to get your reviews in for MyLingerie.net. Click here to visit last week's issue where you can check out the site's challenges and lend your insight and advice to a fellow WebPro reader. Send your reviews here.

As you may have noticed, I'm a big fan of Robin Nobles - she's proven herself an asset to the WebPro community by answering your questions, writing articles, and even participating in the peer review. If you're in the Santa Barbara area, consider attending her January 13th-16th workshop for the latest in search engine optimization. And, while you're at it, read her answers to today's SEO questions, which you can find by scrolling down.

Today's feature article, by Scott Buresh, reveals four excellent ways of protecting your rank in the search engines. Your site may employ optimization techniques that the search engines consider illicit, so be sure to read his article and let me know if you have any specific questions.

I hope you find what you're looking for in this issue, and let me know if there's anything I can help you with.

Thanks,
Garrett

Software Downloads
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Are Your Rankings At Risk?
By Scott Buresh

Ever since there have been search engines, there have been techniques that unscrupulous webmasters and shady search engine optimization firms have used to artificially boost their rankings.

As search engines caught on to these techniques, they devised ways to detect them without having someone physically look at each site (a practical impossibility, considering that several individual engines now index well over a billion pages).

If your business is considering a move to Internet connectivity, or if you’ re setting up someone else’s business, consider Windows 2000’s connection sharing feature. It’s the perfect way for a moderate number of users to access the Internet inexpensively. Brien Posey, MCSE, rolls up his sleeves and shows you how it’s done in today's Techie Corner. Click here for more.

While most engines are becoming more and more adept at detecting "spam" pages and penalizing or removing them, there is an unfortunate side effect to this efficiency- some quality sites that are innocent of intentional wrongdoing can fall unknowingly into the "spam" category.

What follows is a list of issues that can hurt such sites, followed by suggestions of how to prevent penalization or removal.

Issue #1: Bad Links

Much of the internet is founded on sites linking to one another (a search engine itself is really just a very large collection of links). However, with the relatively recent emphasis placed upon a site's links as part of the ranking formula (commonly called "link popularity"), it has become crucial to carefully select and closely monitor the sites with which you exchange links.

Google, the pioneer of this ranking methodology, often penalizes sites that provide links to that they call "bad neighborhoods"- sites that Google determines serve no purpose save for artificially boosting link popularity. It is important to note that sites are only penalized when they actively link to another site, not when a site links to them (which is only fair, as webmasters have no real control over what sites choose to link to theirs).

If any page of your site contains links to outside sites, it is important to make certain that these outside sites are not being penalized. The easiest way to do this on Google is to download the Google toolbar (available at http://toolbar.google.com/). Most pages that you find on the internet have been assigned a "Pagerank", which is represented by a sliding green scale on the toolbar (visit the link to see an example).

To be cautious, avoid linking to any site that does not show any green on this scale (most importantly when this scale is grayed out). Such sites may be penalized, and linking to them may get your site penalized in turn (do not, however, refrain from exchanging links with sites simply because they show just a sliver of green- these sites are not being penalized and links from them may become more valuable over time).

It is also very important to monitor the sites that you link to periodically to make certain that they have not been penalized since you originally added their link to your site.
Click here to read more

Ask Robin Nobles: SEO Pro

Dear Robin,

I manage a finance website, based in the UK. If I optimize my index page to be acceptable to Google, then this page would not be optimized correctly for the directories as they consider more restrictive practices on for example title length, word count etc. With only one domain for the site, how do I get round this?

Thank You,
Colin Yule

Dear Colin...

I have read that the only font that search engines are capable of reading are the fonts used by browsers. That if you use a custom font, such as Bookman, that it will be not be able to spider your site. Is this true?

Thanks,
Nancy McJunkin

Dear Nancy...

I have a section of a web site that deals with comic strips. It's mostly gif files with hardly any text. What can I do to get the search engines to check this out. Adding lots of META tags with keywords will look suspiciously like spamming...

Paul Gosselin

Dear Paul...

Do you have SEO questions? Send them in!

Project Turn Around - Operation Rollout Here is an example of an actual project with many typical challenges found in most projects and how they were addressed to achieve success beyond expectations. It can help provide ideas and tips on how to address real-life sticky situations, move forward without starting over and motivate a diverse group of people from both business and technical departments to turn around a project and deliver on time and under budget. Click here for more

 

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