SEO Demystified: Getting Indexed

In today’s world of sophisticated search engines, you’d have to try real hard not to get a site indexed. The easiest way is to simply do a good job with SEO. If your site is easy for spiders to crawl and has decent link popularity (sites linking to your site), then spiders will index your site. It’s pretty straight forward really. However…yes, there’s usually a “however”. However, what if your site isn’t showing up on Google? What if you’re not being indexed?

Well if that is the case, don’t blame the search engines. Instead, look at your site. Was it developed in a way that is easy for spiders to find and crawl it? Have you been penalized for search engine spam? Often the unscrupulous will attempt to get past a search engine’s guidelines. I’ll describe the main ones, though I’m sure there are others I’m not aware of yet.

Content Spam – This occurs when a site attempts to deceive search engines through manipulation of content on the site. It can include keyword stuffing, misuse of meta tags or deliberately creating misleading content.

Link Spam  – This is any deceptive scheme created to boost link popularity artificially. This could be hiding links from users or search engines or creating artificial domains to manufacture links.

Domain Spam – This is when someone registers multiple domain names in order to boost search engine ranking by obtaining multiple directory listings, creating cross-links between the sites or by putting more pages in the index to increase the odds of having a page ranked.

Redirect Spam – This is when a site redirects search engine visitors to a page other than the one that was ranked. Many spammers will create doorway pages that rank well, and then will redirect a user to another page or conceal the ranked content behind a pop-over element.

Cloaking – This is probably the worst form of spam from a search engine’s perspective. Cloaking is when optimized content is delivered to a search engine and different content to users. All search engines tell you not to cloak. If you do and get caught, you will be banned from their index.

So why did I included all these forms of search engine spamming? Well, unfortunately, there are still those out there that want to deceive the search engines, thinking that they will “one up” the competition.

Personally, I think that besides the obvious ethical and legal problem, the amount of energy one has to spend to stay ahead of the search engines is greater than what has to be spent to accomplish better results legally and ethically. It may be worth a few questions to your SEO consultant to see what techniques they use. You may not understand all the technical jargon, but you should know enough to discern if they are “white hat” or “black hat” in their approach to search engine marketing.