June 18, 2004

SEO Commandment Number Four:

Thou shall never link to bad neighbourhoods
You can’t control who links to you, and, for the most part, no search engine will ever penalize your site if someone links to you, since they know you have no control over it. But you do have control of the sites YOU link to. If you happen to link to a site which some would call ‘a bad neighbourhood’, you might get penalized by some engines for linking to them. Examples of this would be sites that have been penalized in the past (or still are) for prohibited techniques such as invisible text, invisible links, gateway or doorway pages or, in some cases, sites that are really nothing more than a bunch of affiliates sites that are heavily cross linked.

If you feel suspicious before linking to a site, it would help to make a few investigations on your own. Make a search of who’s linking to them. Are they penalized too? I like to think it is "Linker Beware" and proceed cautiously before you do, just to keep safe.

SEO Commandment Number Five:

Thou shall not spam the meta tags
It’s a known fact that most search engines today don’t even care to look at meta tags anymore, since they were spammed and abused so much in the past. The only search engine today that places some importance on meta tags is Inktomi. Since Yahoo is about to drop Google’s search results any day now, it will exclusively use their own search results produced by their own search property, Inktomi. If you decide to write your meta tags, just write your main keywords that are on that particular page. If the page is about blue and red widgets, then that is all that should be written in the meta tags. Don’t ‘stuff’ them with useless keywords that have nothing to do with the actual text written on that page.

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Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 2004

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