Self-Replicating Pages, Grammatically Incorrect Keywords, Link Keywords

We are about to start our affiliate program. We are going to provide each affiliate with a self-replicating page in our site. Can you tell me whether this will affect our rankings in any way? I have read somewhere that search engines frown upon such self-replicating pages.

Tony Drebber


Answer:

Hi Tony,

The search engines generally frown upon a site which has many pages with the same or similar content - they consider this to be a form of spamming. When you use self-replicating pages for your affiliate program, you are obviously not actively trying to spam the engines, but you do run the risk of being penalized or banned by the search engines for spamming. The way out of this problem is to prevent the search engines from spidering the self-replicated pages. The way to do that is to use a robots.txt file. Here's what you should do:

i) Firstly create a folder in the root folder of your site. Name it something like "affiliates", or whatever else that you would like to call it. Then, make sure that the self-replicating pages for all affiliates are present within the "affiliates" folder.

ii) Then, you need to prevent the search engines from being able to spider any pages in the affiliates folder. In order to do that, create a robots.txt file, and add the following lines to it:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /affiliates/

Now upload the robots.txt file to the root folder of your site. That's all that you need to do.

You may be wondering why I recommend that you create a separate folder for the self-replicating pages. You could have the self-replicating pages in the root folder itself. However, in this case, every time an affiliate signed up for your program, you would need to add another entry to the robots.txt file in order to ensure that the new affiliate's self-replicating page is not spidered by the search engines. Since this will take up a lot of time, a better option is to install all the self-replicating pages in a particular folder and then instruct the search engines not to spider any pages in that folder.

If you want to learn more about how to create a robots.txt file, see my article at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?99&robots.htm


QUESTION 2:

I have a site which is some sort of a tourist's guide to Paris. One of the popular keywords for my site, according to WordTracker, is "hotels paris". However, as you can see, it is impossible to write a grammatically correct English sentence which contains the phrase "hotels paris". In this case, how do I optimize my site for this keyword? Do I try to get top rankings at the cost of writing grammatically incorrect English?

Arthur Trentham

Answer:

Hi Arthur,

This is an excellent question - one of the best I have ever received. You are absolutely right in saying that it is impossible to write a grammatically correct English sentence which contains this keyword. However, this does not mean that you should write grammatically incorrect English in order to get top rankings in the search engines. Getting good rankings in the search engines is not the end for you - it is the means to an end. The end for you will be to get the visitors who come to your site from the search engines to take the action that you want them to take (whatever that may be). Suppose your primary source of revenue is to get the visitors to book hotel rooms through your site. If I came to your site from a search engine and found that there were numerous grammatical mistakes in your site, I certainly wouldn't want to book my hotel room through you. I would think that if a site is careless enough to make careless grammatical errors, who knows what kind of mistakes it would make if I asked it to book a hotel room for me?

However, does this mean that you should not optimize your site for this keyword? Luckily, there is a work-around for the problem that you are facing which will allow you to optimize your site for this keyword without making any grammatical mistakes. This work-around arises from the concept of stop words - i.e. words which are very frequently used in the English language, but which, by themselves, do not have any significance. Examples of stop words include "and", "the", "in" etc.

Most search engines, in order to save time and hard disk space, ignore stop words when they are spidering a site and when they are generating the results of a query. Now, consider the phrase "hotels in Paris". It is possible to create grammatically correct English sentences using this phrase. However, as I noted above, "in" is a stop word. This means that when a search engine encounters the phrase "hotels in Paris" in a sentence in your page, it will ignore the "in" and read only the phrase "hotels Paris". Thus, to a search engine, it would appear that you have actually used "hotels Paris" in your site. However, your human visitors will get to see the phrase "hotels in Paris". Thus, all that you need to do in order to optimize your site for the keyword "hotels Paris" is to repeat the phrase "hotels in Paris" in your site.

In this manner, whenever you encounter a keyword which is popular but cannot be used to create grammatically correct English sentences, always think of some stop words that can be included in the keyword so as to make the sentences grammatically correct. Then, simply repeat the keyword inclusive of the stop word in your site.


QUESTION 3:

I am beginning a major reciprocal linking campaign to improve the link popularity of my site. My question is: does it matter what text other sites use to link to me? For instance, if one of my targeted keywords is "weight loss", does it matter if other sites which link to me have "weight loss" in the text which they use to link to me? Or, is getting the link the only thing that I should be concerned about, without worrying about how they have linked to me?

Audrey Kapston


Answer:

Hi Audrey,

Yes, it does matter what text other sites have used to link to you. While different search engines differ regarding how much emphasis they give to keywords being present in the text which has been used to link to you, as a rule, you should always try to get other sites to include your keywords in this text.

The reason that the search engines give emphasis on this is simple. Suppose Site X sells weight loss products. Now, suppose Site Y links to Site X saying "Click here for some quality weight loss products". When a search engine sees this, it thinks that if another site has linked to Site X and has included "weight loss" in the text used for the link, Site X must be providing useful information on weight loss. Hence, the ranking of Site X for the keyword "weight loss" improves. The greater the number of sites which link to Site X with "weight loss" in the text used for the link, the higher the ranking will be of Site X for that keyword.

While keywords being present in the link text is important for almost all engines, it is especially important for Google - getting even a few links containing the keyword in the link text can boost your rankings substantially in Google.