How To Avoid Common Webmaster Traps

Although many webmasters construct their websites carefully, search engine technology has evolved to the point where are some “innocent” ways that you can get in trouble with the search engines if you are unaware. Here are a few of the most common webmaster traps:

DUPLICATE CONTENT

There are many webmasters who operate more than one web site and in some cases use the same content on more than one site in an effort to save time. Although search engines prefer web sites that have a high volume of web pages, the expectation is for each of those web pages to have unique content. When the search engine robot finds that web sites are offering content or Meta tags that is very similar to another web site, they consider it to be duplicate content.

On the other hand, there are some webmasters who use multiple websites and duplicate content in an attempt to trick the search engines into giving them a high search engine ranking. It is very easy for the search engines to know when a group of websites belong to the same webmaster and advise webmasters to use different methods to diversify their content such as offering testimonials or product reviews.

EXTRA LARGE SITE MAPS

Webmasters who are using site maps to assist the search engines run into trouble by creating extra large sitemaps. While site maps can be a boon to your search engine ranking by providing all of the links to your web site in one location, if you create a site map with over 300 links on one page this could very easily trigger the spam filter of some search engines. The best solution to this problem is to divide your site map over several pages.

The other problem webmasters experience with site maps is the result of failing to use the correct letter case in site map files. If the URL titles of your web pages is in lower case and you create years site map with the URL titles in upper case this can cause a problem for the search engines, because to the robot it appears as though you are cloaking your site. The URL title files must be the same case in the site map.

INSTANT INBOUND LINKS

The search engine guidelines for webmasters encourage having quality inbound links. However if the search engine robot visits your website today and finds 10 inbound links and revisits your site in two weeks and finds 100 inbound links, you will lose the positive effect and instead your website may be labeled a “spammer”.

Unfortunately many webmasters have become the prey of unscrupulous individuals who promise them a high page rank overnight by selling them inbound links. Google has issued a strong warning to webmasters to avoid these merchants and has launched a campaign to track down and remove websites who advertise these link schemes from the search engine index plus the web site of any webmaster who participates in these deals as well.

DESIGN ELEMENTS

There are many webmasters who prefer to create web sites with design programs that the search engines have difficulty navigating. Although it has been an established fact for many years that the use of frames in web site design has a negative impact on search engine rankings, to this day there are webmasters who are building web sites with frames. The reasoning they use is that there are many techniques that have been developed to work around the problems that frames cause. However from the search engines point of view, these techniques have not alleviated the problem and the warning is still in place.

The test of a web page in terms of compatibility with the search engine robots is whether or not it can be seen in a plain text browser. Webmasters that use JavaScript, session ID’s, Flash and DHTML should be aware that these are the leading troublemakers for search engine robots.