18 Common Reasons For Poor Search Engine Ranking

Reasons 13 - 15

Reason 13: Your web pages are not search engine-friendly

When search engines crawl the web to find new web pages, they use special software called "spiders", "robots" or "crawlers".

These programs don't have the functionality of full-fledged web browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.

In fact, search engine robot programs look at your web pages like a text browser does. They like text, text, and more text. They ignore information contained in graphic images and animations.

This means that search engine spider programs are not able to use new web browser technology to access your site. If your web pages require Flash, DHTML, cookies, JavaScript, Java or passwords to access the page, then search engine spiders will likely not be able to index your web site.

Therefore, it might be a good idea to test your web pages with very old versions of web browser applications or with a text-only browser such as Lynx.

Reason 14: Search engines could not resolve your domain name

There's a mistake that novice users often do. They register a new domain name, and they submit the web site URL to the search engines immediately. Then they wonder why the search engines didn't index their site. The answer is, they weren't able to do it.

It takes approximately 48-72 hours for a new domain name to become active. All Internet access providers must update their DNS records to reflect new domain name. The process of updating DNS information is called propagation.

Search engines must also update their DNS servers regularly and until then, the new domain name will not be accessible to them.

So when you register a new domain name, you must wait about 48-72 hours before you can submit the domain name to the search engines.

Reason 15: Your web site has a low link popularity

Link popularity is becoming a critical factor for a top search engine ranking these days. Link popularity means the number of web sites linking to your site. However, the quality of links is more important than the quantity of links. For instance, if CNN links to your site, their single link might count a lot more than 30 links from your friends' personal homepage.

By now, all top search engines use link popularity in their ranking algorithm: AltaVista, Inktomi, MSN Search, HotBot, etc. For Google, it's one of the most important factors in ranking sites.

The idea behind link popularity is that other web sites will link to your site only if you are a quality site offering quality content. So if many web sites link to your site, search engines come to the conclusion that your site must be very popular and deserves a high ranking.

Link popularity can do a lot for your site. Not only will the most important search engines rank you higher, but links from other sites will also drive more traffic to you.

In addition, as more sites link to you, the odds increase that search engine spider will visit your site more regularly so it's less likely that they drop your site from their index.