No. This is a common myth that is untrue. If it were true you could get your
competitor penalized or banned by using
automated SEO software to
resubmit their website every 60 seconds. Naturally this does not happen (nor
should it).
Some webmasters will try to say that Google says in their guidelines that you
shouldnt use
automated software like Web
Position Gold. The reason for this is that most of these tools scrape Googles
SERPs to find your sites ranking information. This is in violation of Googles
terms of service. Software that uses Googles API is acceptable for querying
their servers. Also, if you constantly use SEO software to query a search
engines servers you might find that they ban your IP address to prevent you from
using their resources any further. However,
this has no effect on your web pages rankings.
Can search engines see password protected pages?
Search engines are not different from regular users in most ways. They cannot go
anywhere that a regular user cannot go. If you have a
password protected area of your website that cannot be accessed
without a login and password then the search engines cannot see it.
Which is better for SEO: text links or graphical links?
Text links are better for SEO.
Text links can contain the anchor text that your page wishes to rank well for
and that is an important factor in all three search engines,
especially Google. Image links are still valuable but do have less benefits
compared to text links. This is true despite image tags having the ALT attribute
available. The ALT attribute can contain keywords but thanks to keyword stuffing
they now are virtually worthless. (You should be using your ALT attributes for
usability and accessibility and not SEO anyway).
