Dos and Don'ts for Bing Ranking

It's easy for businesses to get caught up in Google's expectations for their sites, when trying to market through search. That's certainly a wise thing to do, considering Google dominates the search market by a huge margin. Still, there are other search engines that people are using, and it is also wise to make sure your site is performing to the best of its ability in those too.

We don't hear as much about what Bing wants out of a site for rankings, but Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center has shared some dos and don'ts of link-building for Bing. Like Google, Bing places great emphasis on quality links to determine its rankings. "Just don't make the mistake of believing it will result in instant gratification. Successful link building efforts require a long-term commitment, not an overnight or turnkey solution," says DeJarnette. "You need to continually invest in link building efforts with creativity and time."

What To Do:

DeJarnette some tips for getting more quality links. Following are Bing's tips for effective link building :

• Find relevant industry experts, product reviewers, bloggers, and media folk, and make sure they're aware of your site/content

• Publish concise, informative press releases online

• Participate in relevant conversations on blogs/forums, referring back to your site's content when applicable

• Publish expert articles to online article directories

• Use social networks to connect to industry influencers (make sure you have links to your site in your profiles)

• Create an email newsletter with notifications of new content

• Participate in relevant industry associations and especially in their online forums

• Strive to become a trusted expert voice for your industry, while promoting your site

• Create an email newsletter with notifications of new content

What Not To Do:

DeJarnette shared a list of things that you should avoid in your link building efforts, if it is a good Bing ranking that you are after. Here is what Bing says will get your site reviewed more closely by staff:

• Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites

• The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time

• Using hidden links in your pages

• Linking out to known web spam sites

• Receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known "bad neighborhoods" on the Web

Most of the stuff DeJarnette shared is nothing any savvy search marketer is not already aware of. That said, there are clearly plenty of online (and offline for that matter) businesses out there that don't have savvy search marketers on the payroll. It can be quite helpful when a search engine itself lays out what to do and what not to do to help webmasters get better rankings.

Tips to Avoid Google Ban

New internet marketers frequently complain about having no idea why their websites have been banned by Google. The majority of these people claim they have absolutely no idea why they have been banned or penalized. The only thing they are 100 percent sure of is that their website no longer exists in the Google search engine.There are two things usually called ban out there:

• When your site has dropped from Google index and does not show anymore for its target keywords.

• When your IP has been blocked and you cannot use Google search for some time.

Both issues are rather unwanted. The first one is applied to your site when it doesn't suit Google webmaster guidelines. The second one is applied to your IP address when you perform agressive amount of queries to Google at a time. Fortunately, you can easily avoid both types of Google ban following the below rules. Let's first deal with website ban:

Spam

Never, ever spam. This involves sending a large amount of unsolicited mail via your domain mail server. Although the legality of mass mailing is a grey area, sites which do this deserve to be banned by every search engine.

Make your site available. Always use reliable hosting service with good uptime (no less than 99.5%) and fast response time. If Googlebot comes to your site and cannot access it, your site may drop.

Excessive Links

Now that so many webmasters are more obsessed with their Google Pagerank than the amount of quality traffic they receive, link pages are fuller than ever. You should try not to place too many outbound links on a single page. If you do need to link to 100 or more sites, place the links on separate pages.

Provide unique and relevant content. Fill your website with fresh unique content that is relevant to your website theme and is interesting to your visitors. Write your content for humans, not for search engine bots. If you post a duplicate content on your site, Google may exclude it from its index.

Cloaking

Seen by many SEO specialists as probably the thing most likely to result in a Google ban, cloaking involves creating one page designed specifically for the search engines, and another which will appear for the user. This is search engine manipulation at its worst.

Selling PageRank

Some sites have gone so far as to sell PageRank - i.e. selling links on highly ranked pages. You can sell links (i.e. advertising), but you cannot sell links for the stated purpose of increasing Google Pagerank.

Carefully build links

Not every inbound link is good. Take care of websites linking to you. Don't participate in link farms. Try to get links from relevant or close theme websites. Do not ever spam forums, guest books or comments with your links! Outbound links are important too. Pay a close attention on what sites do you link from your website. Do not link to sites that use spam techniques, because this may result in your site ban.

Make your site crawlable

Provide a way for Googlebot to index the whole your site. Create sitemap, if you use JavaScript or Flash links - duplicate them with plain text ones. Make sure your server correctly handles errors, like 403, 404, redirects and so on. Check for broken links and HTML errors with some HTML validator tool.

Avoid using domains with bad history

Do not use previously black listed domains for your site.

SEO Software

Don't use unauthorised computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate Google's terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

If you follow these guidelines and steer clear of excessive search engine marketing techniques, you should be fine. Just remember to create a site with is faithful to the product or service you are providing information on and you should be fine. Concentrate on exchanging quality links with similar sites and don't get too obsessed with your Google Pagerank. Quality, returning traffic is the goal.

For Google's webmaster guidelines, visit http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html


How to avoid IP ban?

• Do not use unauthorized software to check web ranking. Google restricts usage of software that send automated search queries to Google. Actually, to be 100% sure your IP won't be banned - do not check your web rankings at all.

• Limit the amount of searches. If the accuracy of Google API search results is not enough for your purposes and using the natural search is crucial for you, try to

• limit the amount searches with some reasonable number. If you check web rankings, don't check first 1000 results, reduce the search to first 30-50 results. This will give you an adequate picture of your current standings and won't stress Google much as well.

• Use Google for its main purpose. Use Google for search only and you never get your IP banned.