ptg16476052696 LESSON 25: Search Engines and SEO
experience, but if you are considering doing it to affect search rankings, you could
affect your rankings—by being booted out of the results altogether.
n Fact: Schemes to get links will only get you banned. Most people know that the
best way to get higher rankings is to get more and higher-quality links back to your
site. While it can be difficult to manipulate a high-quality site to link to you, many
unscrupulous SEO managers have resorted to link farms, paid links, and directory
links to get the absolute number of links to a page increased. Google in particular
takes a dim view of this type of link manipulation and will devalue sites that do it.
n Fact: Duplicate content hurts your site. One of the ways people would try to
increase their search rankings was to increase the amount of content on their site.
And to do this, they would simply copy the content from one page into another
page and another and another. Search engines don’t like duplicate content because
it fills up their index with repetitive information. And while it can be argued that
they don’t penalize sites that have duplicate content, they take time away from
indexing that site that could be used on nonduplicate content. Ultimately, whether
you believe Google (or Bing, or Yahoo!) penalizes sites with duplicate content or
not, the result is the same—fewer of your pages make it into the index to rank well.
If you have duplicate content on your site, get rid of it either by deleting the dupli-
cates or using redirects or the robots.txt file discussed later in this lesson.
n Fact: Search engines are not obligated to include your site. If you suspect that
your site has been removed from one of the major search indexes, you should find
out why directly from them. Google offers Webmaster Tools (https://
http://www.google.com/webmaster), and Bing does too (http://www.bing.com/toolbox/
webmaster/). These tools will give you hints and messages explaining what prob-
lems they might have encountered when indexing your site and give you sugges-
tions for fixing them.Tools for Tracking and Managing SEO
When you’re doing SEO, there are a lot of tools out there to help you. Some were created
by the search engines themselves.Using Sitemaps
Sitemaps are a great way to list all the files on your site in one place for the search
engines to find it. They help search engines find and identify any content that they might
not have found on their own. There are three ways most sites provide a sitemap: XML,
RSS, and plain text.