After having high rank for certain keyword, your next job is to protect it. Protecting is always more difficult than attaining, because many people are watching at you. Your website’s ranking on search engines is your asset and many people wants to ‘steal’ it from you.
When you have a popular blog or having high PageRank, many webmasters want to get link from you. Some do it with the right way, some bringing spam to your blog. Popular blog usually have high link popularity, which is measured by the quantity and quality of sites that link to your site. There are legitimate ways to go about increasing your link popularity, but at the same time, you must be careful about which sites you want to link to. Google frequently give penalties on sites that have linked to other sites solely for the purpose of artificially boosting their link popularity. They are labeled “bad neighborhoods”.
You should check you blog so that it did not link to this bad neighborhood. “Bad neighborhoods” do not get indexed by Google. You can find out this by searching “site:domainname.com”. Replace domainname.com with the domain name you want to check. Because they are not indexed, Google toolbar will show gray, and it will tell you that “No PageRank information is available” when you hover your mouse on the toolbar.
Do not ever link to these sites, porn, gambling site, and websites that uses black hat SEO. Here are some black hat SEO technique:
- Hiding the keyword from human using Img Alt Tags. The bad person will try to make a small 1 by 1 pixel images and providing its Alt tag with his keyword. The code will be: <img src=”black-hat.jpg” alt=”SEARCh ENGINE MARKETING OPTIMIZATION SEARCH ENGINES SEO SEARCH MARKETING”>
- Putting very very long keyword in your page title.
- Make bold of all keyword in your web page.
- Hidden your keyword by using div or invisible text. You can do this by setting the text color to white with a white background.
When you found websites like this, do not link to them. Sooner or later Google will find out and will penalize your website if it is linking to them. An example of “bad neighborhoods” is piratewebmaster.com. If you know other “bad neighborhoods”, please add it at http://smallwebsitehost.com/protect-your-search-engine-rank/seo/
