Why Cloaking Is Always A Bad Idea (by Alan Perkins) Doorway pages These are pages specially prepared for search engines and contain a number of isolated key phrases which are designed solely to attract search engines and cover issues completely different from those of site proper. These pages are often concealed from human visitors with help of cloaking (as mentioned above), because they contain nothing of interest. Since it is necessary to hide fact that their content is meaningless, these pages need regular updating. However, programmers who are in charge of development of searching algorithms are constantly looking for new means of semantic analysis of a web page content. It is becoming more and more hard to create a really 'smart' doorway page that would successfully deceive those algorithms. August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to Semantic Web The Semantic Web All this results in a waste of webmaster’s time and mental energy – energy that could be better spent on good activities such as optimising and polishing existing web pages and creating new ones with attractive, useful and relevant content. Multi-level marketing (MLM) The plan looks so simple. A certain web site raises its ranking in search engines listings due to receiving, say, five inbound links from other sites. Each of these sites aims at getting five links from some other sites, and so on. As a result, site which is on top of pyramid inherits value from all descending sites. So main goal of this kind of website promotion is reduced to merely clambering to top of this accurate and well proportioned structure. So why is it no good? First, this scheme needs to be well organised and managed by a person who is in charge of looking after pyramid, drawing new members and tracing their progress. If he or she decides to take fees for this job it may lead to a conflict of interests. Dragged into fight for reaching top of pyramid, webmasters will have less time for polishing web sites. Thus, pyramid structure destroys idea of ‘natural evolution’ of Internet, a principle that is widely speculated when discussing issues of web promotion. Visit Search Engine Watch and use following principle belonging to code of honour of search engine specialists: ‘Keep away from schemes’. http://www.searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3100291 Clickers False overstating of a website’s traffic statistics is another unfair method of web promotion. It suggests that resource is very popular among Internet users, although it is actually not so. The aim of this trick is to deceive potential buyers of website, rather than search engines, because site owners can gain maximum profit selling resource if they demonstrate high traffic for website. The so-called clickers are hired and instructed to do this job. They keep visiting web site several times a day on a regular basis for a modest fee (or free of charge if site owner is an undisguised cheater), each visit being recorded by a hit counter. A high stated popularity of a web site will increase its perceived value. Then, when contract is concluded and web site finds its new owner, number of visitors will drop, possibly to zero, as phantom visits will, unsurprisingly, stop. Indexing of a website on different servers In an effort to attract extra traffic, many people register several domains linking to one and same resource. But nowadays it makes no sense to duplicate web pages with different domain names but identical content, for modern search engines have learned to identify them. It can even result in being removed from indexes. It is difficult to avoid such troubles and stop a search engine robot from doubting originality of content at all web pages exposed to indexing. First of all, robot sees that resources are linking to each other and compares their headings, key phrases and content. Pages which look suspicious to it are processed by a special algorithm and deemed duplicated if: 1.they hold outbound links which lead to one and same resource; or 2.these links are equal to or less than 10 per cent different in number. Some search engines, for instance AltaVista, also employ this program when checking up their indices revealing pages which were entered there by mistake. Therefore, don’t be surprised if you find your duplicated web pages expelled from databases. Placing of duplicated pages on different servers is also regarded as an unethical way to promote a web site and is best avoided. However, if you find method essential and are not going to take foregoing advice, we offer these recommendations: 1.alter content on your web pages so that they look somewhat different; 2.slightly change headings, list of key phrases, and description; 3.make sure that at least 10 per cent of number of links on your pages is not identical. Conclusion Even though there are many legitimate and efficient methods of web site promotion, many people find unethical ones more attractive. Disregarding web surfers’ interests, they attempt to deceive search engine itself in an effort to make it place their resources nearer top of a listing. Most of all, they concern themselves with visitors’ clicks, thus transferring money to a site owner’s purse. Left unchecked, such unscrupulous practices will be counterproductive. The reason? The web will be driven into chaos and cheating will prevail, thus making it a battlefield for ‘intellectual’ confrontation between crafty webmasters and developers of special algorithms to resist their tricks. As war is fought, both sides will make small gains which will instantly be swallowed up by newer ideas. In no man’s land will be frustrated users of Internet, gradually losing faith and trust in medium and starting to switch off. We are convinced that it is preferable to work towards better quality, more interesting web pages, polished, usable sites and improved services. The result will be well-deserved brand recognition and insistence, and sites will promote themselves.

Dmitry Antonoff, 28. I've been with Magic Web Solutions ltd. (UK), Dartford, Kent, as a marketer and an SEO consuntant, since May 2003. I specialise in website promotion, and copywriting. I'm eager to share my experience with the Internet community.