Can incoming links hurt me?
Personally I don't think so.
But there has been some recent speculation that links to your site that looks spammy may hurt your rankings.
So how do spammy links look like?
- Thousands from the same IP.
- All the same anchor text.
- Only up temporarily and have no real age.
- Coming from spammy/questionable/not-so-good sites.
- Has a set pattern.
- Unnatural growth, like suddenly thousands overnight.
What is a Link Farm?
A linkfarm is any type of website in which there is no real content, service, or purpose, but rather just a load of non-related reciprical links to other places. Generally linkfarms are built to increase search engine rankings and turn a profit, which means they're also generally littered with advertisements from affiliate programs the site owner has partnered with.
Linkfarms are not to be confused with Linkdumps, which are simply places people dump all kinds of links to content on various websites
Can I get my site accepted faster into DMOZ?
DMOZ (www.dmoz.org) has the ability to frustrate webmasters with its opaque site selection process. Though the guidelines are clear and fair, the actual implementation is not.
The only 3 things you can do to possibly get into DMOZ faster are:
1) Follow all the editorial guidelines
2) Choose the right subcategory
3) Submit a meaningful site.
Despite following all 3 of these instructions, you might be in a position where your site is not added for years, if at all. This has more to do with the availability of editors for the site, and their choice.
There are stories about people managing to "bribe" editors into getting their sites into DMOZ faster. These are unverified, and I would not recommend this route.
Despite all its faults, the popularity of the DMOZ data is so high that DMOZ submission is well worth the 15 minutes it takes. Good Luck
Does the web host have anything to do with the ranking?
As such, a web host can not help to improve the rankings. Search Engines will not rank you higher because your site is hosted on a particular web host (means buying hosting from Yahoo does not means your site will rank well in Yahoo) but yes if you choose a web host that remains down a lot that can certainly have a negative effect on your rankings.
So do keep in mind that though a web host will not help to improve your SE rankings but yes a bad host can have a bad effect on your rankings
What is relative vs absolute links?
When designing a site, you will always face the question of whether you should use relative or absolute links. Later in this answer I will explain the benefits of each but first here is a definition:
Relative: Relative links usually look something like index.html or /folder/page.html. The way the page knows where to go is all relative to the page the link is placed on. A link to index.html for example, will only work if the file is found in the current folder.
Absolute: Absolute links usually look something like http://www.example.com/page.html. This is a full url and the linked to page will be found regardless of where that link is located on the site.
Which you use depends on the following:
Speed: When your browser goes to find a page with a relative url it looks within the existing site. When it uses an absolute url it leaves the site for an instant and "refinds" the page. This means when it comes to speed, relative is the way to go.
Ease of Design: When you are designing a site using notepad, the danger with relative urls is that if you move a folder, it can break your entire site. As each page depends on another, if you are not a find and replace whiz, absolute may be your best bet.
SEO: This is the one area that I would place firmly in "Theory or Assumption". The truth is that we know broken links can hurt you so the most important is to choose a technique of linking that works best for your site. One of the better case for Absolute Links can be seen here
How do I get my web site to show up in the search engines?
As you might have noticed the submit URL function on the major search engines does not really help that much.
The best way to get your web site listed faster in the search engines is to get links to it from authority web sites (those with high Page Rank).
By getting a great link from for example the home page of an established Page Rank 7 web site can make your new web site and it's subpages indexed in a matter of hours.
If this is not an option for you then other good ways is to put a link to it from big forums signature, directories, friends sites etc.
If you wonder why only the home page is listed and not the rest it is because the search engine spiders first visits one time and then comes back for a "deep crawl". To speed up this process, the solution is to get more links to your site.
What are poison words?
Poison words are those which Search Engines will decrease your ranking for if found in your Url, Title, or Description. These can be a disaster when it comes to ranking and therefore you should be very careful to avoid them.
Poison Words Can be Divided into three categories
Ranking Killers (Adult Words and Obscenities)
Use of these words will cause the major Search Engines to analyse the website as "Adult". For a mainstream website this can mean your visitors never find your site. If one of these words is necessary, its always best to star out one of the letters. The most popular forum software and CMS systems will allow you to do this through their Admin panels
Ranking Decreasers
These include words the the major Search Engines associate with a lower quality site. These include but are not limited to Links, Search Engine, Bookmarks, Resources, Directory, BBS, Paid-to-Surf and Forum. The pages containing these words will still be indexed however they will find it very difficult to rank for their main keywords.
Speculative
These words are similar to Ranking Decreasers except they are merely theory at this point. They include words like "Free" or "Offer". Many of the pages using these words seemed to take a hit in the Bourbon Update.
The moral of the story is that you should be very careful with your Keyword choices, especially when writing your title and description. If you have a forum or a CMS system, use the profanity filters whenever possible
We can also make some assumptions on Google in particular by referencing the stop words used by their AdSense PPC program. These can be found on Vaughn's Summaries. There you will see a comprehensive list of Keywords that stop AdSense ads from showing. Although this isn't a direct correlation, it does give some insight into the way Google views Keywords
What are stop words?
Stop words are the small common words that the search engines are ignoring.
They should be avoided as much as possible in places like the title, headings and maybe some other places
How do I create a sitemap?
A sitemap should contain links to all your pages. A good rule of thumb is to limit the number of links to under 100 per page, so you may consider splitting sitemaps up by topic, alphabetically, by brand or other logical grouping.
A useful tool to create a basic sitemap is the Xenu's Link Sleuth, a free site crawler that produces an HTML sitemap that can be edited to fit your site's design.
If your content is dynamically driven from a database, you should also create your sitemap(s) from the same data
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