Unusual Things May Influence Ranking

by S. Housley

You may not realize the impact the following items have on your search engine ranking but they are worth considering when developing a plan for your website. While Google provides a whole host of great tools, their motivation may be more selfish than you believe. Google uses the information they gather in these tools to make determinations about websites. The information they gather may impact the ranking of your website in organic searches for important keyword phrases.

1. Low Traffic

Google collects a vast amount of information using the Google Toolbar, Analytics, Google Search and now Google Chrome. Google can track click-throughs, and the amount of time a visitor remains on a website. If the website is not sticky, meaning that visitors do not stay on the web site for any length of time, or does not attract visitors Google may view the website as being insignificant or less important than a competing website that attracts similar website visitors.

2. Low Value Links

The proverb "you are who you hang with" can be attributed to search engine linking. If you consistently link to what Google perceives as low-quality websites, your website may be perceived to be of the same ilk, and Google may devalue your website based on the linking scheme you use.

3. Incoming Links not Trusted

A website that has a large number of incoming links from websites that are not considered trusted sources by Google, could impact your search ranking. Incoming links have long been known to be a component in organic search ranking, it was previously believed the more links the better. What may now be true is that web sites may be penalized for links from untrusted sources.

4. Unreliable Hosting

If Google is frequently unable to access your website when they attempt to spider it, they will perceive that the website is unreliable and may devalue its importance in their algorithm.

5. Spam Techniques

Using techniques that are widely known to be considered "black hat" or "spammy" like keyword stuffing, or cloaking pages may cause your website to be penalized by Google as well as other search engines.

6. Duplicate Titles

Avoid using duplicate titles and meta tags on all web pages within your website. Google prefers unique titles and descriptions on all pages within a website.

7. Unnatural Links


The links coming into your website should vary. If you have an unnatural linking structure where the same term is always used to link to your website, it will appear to Google that you have attempted to "game" the system and as a result your site could find itself penalized.

It is safe to assume that Google in its infinite wisdom evaluates the historical performance of a website and considers the information they collect when assessing the importance of any website.


Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for RecordForAll http://www.recordforall.com audio recording and editing software.