The way your website navigation works (or doesn't work), along with the quality and relevance of inbound and outbound links is very important if you want to avoid search engine stumbling blocks.
Search engine spiders (robots) crawl you website pages looking for relevant information for their users. If you have navigation errors that block the path through your website, the spiders run away. So do your potential customers.
How many times have you clicked a navigation link on a website, and received an error messages? Then what did you do? Probably got off the site.
It happens all the time, so website owners should constantly check their navigation paths or risk not only losing visitors, but also providing a stumbling block for the search engines. Here are a few examples of what happens and tips to avoid website navigation problems:
Bad links
Broken links to internal pages within your website and outgoing bad links (404 errors) to other sites that no longer exist, or don't connect when clicked, will throw search engine spiders off your site, as well as your visitors.
You need to ensure that all your pages can be reached from the page you submit to the engines (preferably your homepage) to maximise your chances of achieving good listings. Make sure your links can be followed.
If there's no link from your home page to the page you want indexed, a search engine may decide the page is unimportant or of low-quality.
Deep Links
If you submit just your home page, don't expect a search engine to travel more than one or two links away from the home page or from the page that you submitted.
You'll often need to submit pages individually that appear further down into your site or create more direct links from the home page, so that the search engines can find them.
You can check your website for broken links here
Inbound and Outbound Links and Link Popularity
Every major search engine uses link analysis as part of their ranking algorithms, which gives search engines a useful means of determining which pages are good for particular topics or search terms. The algorithms have recently changed to prevent 'artificial' links from falsely inflating a website's popularity. Known as 'link spam' this includes people using unethical methods of gaining higher ranking, such as keyword stuffing, using doorway pages, link farms, and placing ads on high page ranked sites and pages.
Bogus Links
Most search engine robots are aware of the 'link farms' (also known as 'link exchanges') which exist solely to get higher search engine placement. Most search engines ignore websites using this technique, or de-list already listed websites which participate.
If you use a 'search engine optimization' program that promises to "add your link to thousands or hundreds of thousands of sites", you are probably going to lower your chances of getting a high rank in the search engines.
Free For All (FFA) Links
Free for All (FFA) websites claim you can massively boost your inbound link popularity. All you have to do is enter your URL and email address into a field and a link to your website is automatically created for you on the FFA page. But be warned:
These FFA pages are usually only set up to capture your email address, so if you submit to them be prepared to receive tons of spam email.
The links on the FFA page are a meaningless set of links. As a result, nobody uses them to search for any content on the web.
On many of the sites, as soon as a link is added to the list, the oldest link on the list is deleted. Bulk submission tools used generally mean that your link will stay on the FFA page only a few days, with only a slight possibility that a search engine will visit during this period.
No Inbound Links/Link Popularity
If your site has no external pages linking in to your website, it is likely the site will not be indexed by Google.com or the other major search engines. Here's what Google says:
"The ONLY way a site is included in our index is if our crawlers are able to find it by jumping from link to link on the Web. If we have not found your pages, it is because we have not encountered any links on the web pointing to your site.
This is not to say that no sites on the Web contain links pointing to your site - it simply means that no sites found by Google contain links pointing to your page. If you increase the links pointing to the page, Google will likely find your site in the future."
Sometimes, the major search engines may index your home page but refuse to index any other pages until you achieve at least one or more links from another domain. Or, they may index you for a while, but then "prune" their database later of all websites that did not achieve any external links within a certain period of time.
Once you do establish some links, resubmit your pages and the pages that link to you. Once you have links to your website, it becomes much easier to get indexed, stay indexed, and to achieve top rankings.
Learn more about Reciprocal Links and Link Popularity
Check your Link Popularity here
Learn more about Search Engine Stumbling Blocks on these related pages:
Web Hosting and IP Address Stumbling Blocks
Unacceptable Techniques for Search Engines
More Search Engine Submission Stumbling Blocks
Avoid Search Engine Stumbling Blocks
Website Design and Construction Stumbling Blocks
Website Content Stumbling Blocks
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