Two important statements came out of Google recently, and as Google goes, so does the search engine market. Make sure your search engine marketer knows about these two items.
Buying and Selling Text Links Are Evil
Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of
Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s
ranking in search results.
In the past, one way to get more incoming links–and thus improve your standing in the search engines–was to buy text links from other Web sites. Besides the traffic that you might receive, search engines saw these incoming links as "votes of confidence." However, Google has ruled that these links are there to artificially raise a Web site’s ranking, so they will be penalized.
To reduce the incentive to use text links Google is penalizing both the sellers and buyers of these links.
Shared IPs Are as Good as Dedicated IPs
Lots of sites are hosted on shared IPs. If this had a negative effect
on ranking, it would harm most of the sites on the web–and that’s not
good for small webmasters or for our users. So, understandably, sharing
an IP should not have an effect your ability to rank.My advice: don’t worry about it. Host your site however you think
is best, and instead spend your time focusing on the content–making
sure your pages are easy to navigate for users regardless of their
browser or hardware, and ensuring that the content you provide is
informative and unique.
This is a confirmation that Google has made several times before. So, if you’re getting pressure from your search engine marketer or your hosting company to upgrade to a dedicated IP, just tell ‘em to take a hike.
If you have no idea what this means, the upshot is that you don’t HAVE to know.
Now, get back to writing targeted, keyword-rich content to improve your search engine rankings!
Rich Brooks
SEO for Small Businesses
