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So tell me, exactly how do the search engines rank pages?
How can I get my pages at the top?
Search engines use complex and proprietary algorithms to rank web pages
according to a variety of factors. The search engine companies keep their algorithms very secret for competitive reasons, and to prevent people from making pages that spam them. By reverse engineering it is possible, but ifficult and very time consuming, to come very close to knowing exactly how a particular search engine ranks pages and thus be able to make pages that rank extremely well. It is not possible to know with 100% accuracy the exact formula used by a search engine because:
- To do so would require that you reverse engineer using several 100% perfectly scoring web pages, which do not exist!
- Other factors beyond your control or HTML design also play a small role in
search engine positioning.
The good news is that you do not have to be 100% accurate to score well and
you do not have to reverse-engineer the search results yourself! You can use existing resources to make pages that will score in the top 10 positions, or at least in the top 30. AND THAT'S GREAT FOR YOUR WEB SITE! The pages that are created specifically to rank highly on search engine results are commonly known as doorway pages (or gateway, entry, or bridge pages).
What factors go into the calculation?
Ranking criteria varies from search engine to search engine. Most calculate
page rankings based on these elements:
- Prominence of the keyword searched in the viewable text
- Frequency of the keyword searched in the viewable text
- Site Popularity
- Weight of the keywords
- Proximity of keywords
- Keyword Placement
- Prominence, frequency, and weight of keywords in the [TITLE] tag(s)
- Prominence, frequency, and weight of keywords in the [META 'DESCRIPTION']
- Prominence, frequency, and weight of keywords in the [META NAME='KEYWORD']
- Keywords in [H1]: or other headline tags
- Keywords in the [A HREF='http://yourcompany.com/page.htm'][/A] link tags
- Keywords in ALT tags
- Keywords in [!-- ] comment tags
- Keywords contained in the [INPUT TYPE='HIDDEN' NAME='HIDDEN' VALUE='include list of keywords here'] the hidden form tag
- Keywords contained in the URL or site address, e.g., http://www.keyword.com/keyword.htm
- Grammatical correctness and natural-sounding word patterns
- Absence of formatting, repetition, and word arrangement that could be considered as spam.
Each engine has lower and upper limits or thresholds for each variable and criteria. This protects it against spammers and that is why simply repeating keywords will not work.
Doorways: A solution to a dilemma
All said, you need to have pages designed specifically to rank highly in search engines. A doorway page is simply a page that has been created for the sole purpose of ranking higher in the search engines for a particular keyword or set of keywords. These pages act as 'doorways' to the real content of your site, without having to redesign or modify content in your current web site's pages. A doorway is designed for the search engines, to make the search engines 'happy'. The doorway page then links to your main site and takes your visitors there.
A web site is designed for people, to make people 'happy', to fill a need, make money, whatever. However, what is good for people is not always good for the search engine. If, for example, you have a web site that has a lot of graphics and hardly any text, or one that runs on a database and creates dynamically generated pages, or one that is in a highly competitive area, or even one that deals with a wide variety of general topics, chances are that your pages will rank very poorly on search engine rankings.
This creates a serious dilemma: how to make web pages that are both leasing, useful, and logical to humans, and at the same time super-friendly to search engines.
Doorway pages help you solve these troubling dilemmas. You can keep your current web site as it is and create dozens of doorway pages, each optimized to rank well for a different keyword in a different engine. Typically, when targeting 10 keywords, across 5 search engines, you will end up with 50 pages pointing to your home page or other section on your site. Do not worry as this is not unusual, and search engines will not penalize you as long as your doorway pages are professional and honest, and so is your submission. You will want your Web site to be found under several keywords that your prospects are likely to search by. For this reason, you will want to create separate pages that emphasize each of those keywords/phrases and rank well for each search engine. On average, to cover all possibilities, you need to make doorways for about 50 keywords or phrases related to your product or service, for each of the top search engines. That is extremely powerful online marketing!
I am concerned. Are doorways ethical? Are they considered as spam by the search engines?
Before getting started on using doorways to improve your search engine ranking, you need to know a little about spam and spamdexing. Spamming the search engines (or spamdexing) is the practice of using unethical or unprofessional techniques to try to improve search engine rankings. You should be aware of what constitutes spamming to avoid trouble with the search engines. Generally, it is very easy to know what not to do to avoid being called a spammer. By following a few simple rules, you can safely improve your search engine rankings without spamming the engines.
What constitutes spam?
Some techniques are clearly considered as an attempt to spam the engines. Where possible, you should avoid these:
- Keyword stuffing. This is the repeated use of a word to increase its frequency on a page. Search engines now have the ability to analyze a page and determine whether the frequency is above a 'normal' level in proportion to the rest of the words in the document.
- Invisible text. Some webmasters stuff keywords at the bottom of a page and make their text color the same as that of the page background. This is also detectable by the engines.
- Tiny text. Same as invisible text but with tiny, illegible text.
- Page redirects. Some engines, especially Infoseek, do not like pages that take the user to another page without his or her intervention, e.g. using META refresh tags, cgi scripts, Java, JavaScript, or server side techniques.
- META tags stuffing. Do not repeat your keywords in the META tags more than once, and do not use keywords that are unrelated to the content of your site.
- Unrelated keywords. Never use keywords that do not apply to the content of your site.
- Too many doorways with similar keywords. Do not create too many doorways with very similar keywords.
- Duplicate submissions. Do not submit the same page more than once on the same day to the same search engine.
- Identical pages. Do not submit virtually identical pages, i.e. do not simply duplicate a web page, give the copies different file names, and submit them all. That will be interpreted as an attempt to flood the engine.
- Code swapping. Do not optimize a page for top ranking, and then swap another page in its place once a top ranking is achieved.
- Doorways to directories. Do not submit doorways to directories like Yahoo They are only good for use with search engines and not with directories.
- Oversubmission. Do not submit more than the allowed number of pages per engine per day or week (see below table).
| |
AltaVista |
HotBot |
Excite |
Lycos |
Infoseek |
| Time to index a submitted page |
1-2 days |
2 days |
3-4 weeks |
2-4 weeks |
1 day |
| Time to index a page that is spidered/crawled
by the search engine spider |
About 2 weeks |
About 2 weeks |
3-4 weeks |
2-4 weeks |
Rarely spiders |
| Maximum number of page submissions allowed per period (please note that this is not the total number of pages that can be indexed, it is just the total number that can be submitted. If you can only submit 25 pages to Excite, for example, and you have a 1000 page site, that's no problem. The search engine will come crawling your site and index all pages, including those that you did not submit). |
1-10 pages per day. |
50 pages per day. |
25 pages per week. |
N/A |
50 pages per day, unlimited when using e-mail ubmissions. |
Gray Areas
There are certain practices that can be considered spam by the search engine when they are actually just part of honest web site design. For example, Infoseek does not index any page with a fast page refresh. Yet, refresh tags are commonly used by web site designers to produce visual effects or to take people to a new location of a page that has been moved. Also, some engines look at the text color and background color and if they match, that page is considered spam. You could have a page with a white background and a black table somewhere with white text in it. Although perfectly legible and legitimate, that page will be ignored by some engines. Another example is that Infoseek advises against (but does not seem to drop from the index) having many pages with links to one page. Even though this is meant to discourage spammers, it also places many legitimate webmasters in the spam region (almost anyone with a large web site or a web site with an online forum always has their pages linking back to the home page). These are just a few examples of gray areas in this business. Fortunately, because the search engine people know that they exist, they will not penalize your entire site just because of them.
What are the penalties for spamdexing?
There is an inappropriate amount of fear over the penalties of spamming. Many webmasters fear that they may spam the engines without their knowledge and then have their entire site banned from the engines forever. That just does not happen! The people who run the search engines know that you can be a perfectly legitimate and honest web site owner who, because of the nature of your web site, has pages that appear to be spam to the engine. They know that their search engines are not smart enough to know exactly who is spamming and who happens to be in the spam zone by mistake. Therefore, they do not generally ban your entire site from their search engine just because some of your pages look like spam. They only penalize the rankings of the offending pages. Any non-offending page is not penalized. Only in the most extreme cases, where you aggressively spam them and go against the recommendations above, flooding their engine with spam pages, will they ban your entire site. Some engines, like HotBot, do not even have a lifetime ban policy on spammers.
As long as you are not an intentional and aggressive spammer, you should not worry about your entire site being penalized or banned from the engines. Only the offending pages will have their ranking penalized. Our doorways are created
with all the current rules in mind to ensure that you can safely position your site better on the engines.
Is there room for responsible search engine positioning?
Yes! Definitely! In fact, the search engines do not discourage responsible search engine positioning. Responsible search engine position is good for verybody - it helps the users find the sites they are looking for, it helps the engines do a better job of delivering relevant results, and it gets you the traffic you want!
