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What is Black Hat SEO?
This article is about Black Hat SEO, there are more articles and techniques within this category. View all Black Hat SEO articles. |
Your site’s page ranking depends on a lot of factors such as incoming traffic, popularity and indexing in search engines. And it is evident that a lot of SEO artists venture on techniques which involve link building, keyword research and metatags, as well as spamming and other forbidden methods in order to provide success to their site. But while most of them venture on these aspects, it is quite important to know that the indexing of your site’s pages hold great value. Playing with the indexing can actually boost up your site’s rankings in search results, thus it’s time you learn about link saturation.
Search engines do not actually index all your site’s pages, only a certain percentage of them. It is because they cannot accommodate all the sites created in the web, as they have a saturation limit to follow-otherwise the search engines will crash. You are lucky if 80% of your site is indexed, which rarely happens.
Saturation pertains to the number of pages you have indexed as compared with the number of pages found on your site. Meanwhile, the number of links found in your site’s index compared with the actual number of inbound links is called link saturation. The importance of learning about link saturation is as follows:
- Detect which links could be of great use to boost your site’s page ranking
- Find dormant links and see if they can be used or not
But how do you conduct link saturation?
First, you check out the log files. In the log files you can find the new and old inbound links which search engines have missed. These files are located below the public_html folder, which can be easily accessed via the Awstats confic file at CPanel.
- Open the log file in your favorite text editor and check out where are the referrers and parse them out so you can see a better view of the list of sites linked to yours.
- When you have your link list, it’s time to have them indexed. You can do this by creating roll over sites, distributing the links via blogroll, or come up with a third party rolling site map. You can also use blog aggregators if you are receiving a high amount of links per day, or if you are expecting that a high percentage of your pages are getting indexed.
In order to have the links indexed, you can use mass pings via some Windows applications available to you. You can also clean up your referral link list by removing common referrers such as Yahoo, MSN, and Google.
Second, check the direct referrals. Now that you have removed the common referrals, you should then monitor the new referrals. Here are the tasks you must do:
- Check out if the referral exists at the user display page. If it exists, then have it submitted to ping sites such as Pingomatic so that it would ping all the available services using the user’s browser. You can do it using the following codes:
CGI CODE
if(($ENV{’HTTP_REFERER’} ne “”) || ($ENV{’HTTP_REFERER’} =~ m/http:\/\/(www\.)?$mydomain\//)) {
print qq~~;
}
PHP CODE
if($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] != “” || preg_match(”/http:\/\/(www\.)?$mydomain\///i”,$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] > 0) {
echo “”;
}
These scripts will then check if the referrer link actually exists. If the link doesn’t exist then it will display an invisible IFRAME that delivers the link to Pingomatic. If you want to play safe then you may also check Yahoo, Google or MSN referrers or other unclean referrers you may get from time to time.
If you happen to own an older site and start using this method, then you would be surprised to find out how many links you have already collected. You may first see your own links go triple or quadruple, but they are just a mere illusion so there’s nothing to worry about. You’ve just garnered those links because they were not (and never were) indexed in the search engines. Once you finish the task of link saturation, you will start to notice a significant improvement in your site’s efficiency and accuracy particularly in link saturation campaigns.
A lot of SEO artists have overlooked this technique mainly because they look irrelevant. However, link saturation is very much an important task to do for it not only boosts your site’s page ranking, but also gets rid of the irrelevant referrer links which only hamper your site’s pages to be indexed. Remember that not all incoming links hold value to your site in terms of link building, as they tend to lower your page ranking and exclude a high percentage of your pages from getting indexed, thus you have to monitor which ones can be used and which ones should be removed. Pushing your pages’ relevance up a notch truly helps in improving your site with search engines-so why not do it now?
