The Importance of ICRA or Safesurf Tags in an Optimised Webpage
By: David Keffen
The debate has raged for years as to whether a designated 'safe site' free of adult content will be ranked higher than one without such tags.
We've tested this theory many times over the last two years and have definitely noticed a substantial improvement to ranking for the pages with Child-Safe tags.
On average we noticed anything from two to three page jumps for those with the tags. When we removed them they didn't slump as much, but certainly lost a number of ranking positions.
Our specific focus has been Google (specifically google.co.uk) and Live.com, both of whom seem to respond similarly to the tags.
As with any guaranteed safe content site, it is important to be careful that you stick to the rules...ie. variable uncontrolled content e.g. chat rooms and forums, no nudity, profanity etc, etc. Although Safety sites will allow you to tag with partial 'adult' content, our experiments did not include sites with any of the above.
For sites that are already on page one under a specific search term, a one to two page position improvement was noticed.
We did not notice any improvement in ranking when using several of the approved bodies tags, so there seems little point in bothering with more than one for each site.
It is normally expected to put the tags on every page of a site, but of course, with an existing large site, this can be rather time consuming. We haven't found any noticeably detrimental effects from only including the tags on the index page. It is certainly something that could be done when time permits, but our strategy has been to start with the index page as quickly as possible and worry about the other pages later on.Note: The author does not advocateusing the tags in a cavalier fashion, (i.e. merely as an SEO tool) out of respect for the bodies involved.
As with all SEO tactics, there will be many who disagree with this as a worthwhile technique, but my point is - what harm can it do?
Provided, of course, that the site does not include adult content such as that mentioned above, there is very little work to do to get the site approved by one of the safety bodies. Webmasters generally self-assert that the content conforms to the standards required.
Just a word of caution, though - occasionally the auto code generators on the ICRA site have not produced clean results when pasted into an xhtml site. It is always best to take a careful look at it and maybe use the W3C Validator service to check for problems.
Of course, the usual combination of good coding, meta information, carefully selected keywords, back-links with good PR and lots of targeted fresh page content are always going to be required.
David Keffen is chief SEO within the Techsus group of web-based service companies. He is also a professional photographer.
http://www.rustyhippo.co.uk (click on the Hippo)
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