Three Things SitePro News Got Wrong

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 20 of November , 2008 at 10:16 pm

An article in SitePro News has a couple of things all wrong:

First, webmasters using “blackhat” search engine optimization techniques are not criminals. I heaved a heavy sigh when I read this sentence:

The bad news is that some high quality, completely above-board sites are being mistaken for these web page criminals.

The author here is talking about nefarious means of attaining link popularity. He is correct when he says that search engines have found a way to flag sites as spammers as to penalize those sites when doing wrong, but let’s not overstate it. A criminal is a person who breaks a law. There is no law that says using non-search-engine-approved linking methods is wrong. Google spammers aren’t criminal even if they may be something else desirable.

Secondly, Filomena Serraino’s definition of link popularity is all wrong:

Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are linked to.

No it’s not. It’s not based on that at all. It’s based on the number of inbound links to a web page. Those are inbound links, not outbound links, though Google did pioneer the practice of counting inbound links as important for web page authority.

Since the author got his definition of link popularity wrong, his whole discussion of the subject is wrong. You cannot control other sites linking to you. You can, however, control which sites you link to and you shouldn’t link to sites that might harm your visitors in some way or that might be “bad neighborhoods.” But if you do, your link popularity won’t be affected.

Google won’t even penalize you if a bad site links to you. They may discount the link, but since you didn’t do anything to get that link then you aren’t being penalized and it shouldn’t matter. If you paid for links and those links are discounted because they came from a bad site or bad neighborhood then you are out the money that you paid. It’s a bit like paying for drugs only to get home and find out that what you got was parsnip, not hash. Or worse, the guy selling it to you was an undercover cop and now you’re going to jail. Why be stupid?

The author does do a great job, though, of explaining the dangers of hidden text and I echo his warning to not use the same color for text that you use for background color - even if you place that text within a box of a different color. The search engines may miss that all-too-important code describing your box.

But Filomena Serraino drifts back into the realm of not knowing what he’s talking about when he makes the assertion that search engines use keyword density measures to analyze websites:

A search engine uses what is called “Keyphrase Density” to determine if a site is trying to artificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio of keywords to the rest of the words on the page. Search engines assign a limit to the number of times you can use a keyword before it decides you have overdone it and penalizes your site.

That’s not true at all. There is no optimal keyword density that will help you rank your web pages for the keywords you want to target. Google, and to some extent Yahoo! and MSN Live, are able to judge a website using something called semantic search, which is recognition of similar or related words used on a web page for the purpose of determining what the page is about. It is entirely possible to rank for keywords that do not even appear on the page.

It is surprising to me that SitePro News would run an article that so blatantly blurs the line between truth and myth. This article is right about several things, but it’s wrong about just as many things. Be careful what you read and trust online. Know who you can trust and who you can’t.

                      Category: Link Building                      

No comments yet.