Doorway Pages: The Ancient Art Of Search Engine PositioningWritten by Cal Gulla
To spam or not to spam … that is question. Since dawn of SEO community spam and spam tactics, including doorway pages, have been used and often abused by those hoping to attain higher ranking on search engines. The problem with these tactics is that they are often short-lived as search engines work hard to keep up and eventually penalize sites using these tactics. So what can a Webmaster do to attain top positioning?In this article we will focus on use of doorway pages in this, part one of three articles covering commonly used spam tactics and more “legitimate” (we’ll call anything that search engines haven’t spoken out against “legitimate”) methods for attaining these top positions. What will be covered in this article? -Doorway pages and why they are penalized -What can you do to provide same effect for your website without risk Doorway Pages And Why They Are Penalized By definition doorway pages are pages of with keyword heavy content, not meant to be seen by visitor but which are designed to attain high rankings on search engines. There is generally a forward or redirect on this page which will take searcher to a “pitch page” or index page. Because these pages serve no useful function other than attaining high rankings, search engines have attempted time and time again to penalize sites using them. As “intelligent” as many search engine algorithms are, webmasters and “black arts” SEO’s are constantly in a battle with them to workaround detection of redirect technology. In end however, virtually every technology will be found out. When you’re site hits top 10 and your competitors notice redirect they are likely to report you and then Google will take a look at how you’ve done it and add detection for that tactic. Basically, using redirect technology may work for a while however it will get found out eventually so it should only be used if you are using a dummy domain that you want to discard, or if you just don’t care if your site gets blacklisted. What can you do to provide same effect for your website without risk? Until recently there was only one commonly used tactic that would provide same effect for your website without use of a redirect and that was hidden text. The problem with hidden text now is that … once again … search engines have built into their algorithms ability to detect it. This is relatively simple; if background is same color as text then it is considered hidden (a fairly obvious detection strategy right?).
| | Search engines-To pay or not no pay?Written by David Bell
While Web is still a great place for free advertising and promotion, there are some times that you simply have to put out... money, that is.I hear a lot of whining about how Internet is meant to be FREE. Why should we have to pay to be listed on a search engine? The answer is simple. Money.Not your money. The search engine's money. As in payroll, rent, servers, insurance, computers and so on. Do math. Assume it takes even as little as 3 minutes to process a site submission. That means an average employee can review at most 20 sites each hour. Or only 160 sites each day. Let's pretend that Yahoo! only gets 200,000 submissions per day. That would require 1,250 employees just to keep up with reviews, not counting supervisors, managers, support staff and all of other needs that 1,250 employees would have. That only takes care of new submissions. What about all of maintenance required to a database as large as theirs? URL changes. Dead links. Name changes. So what it really comes down to is this: people that say Net should be "Free" really mean that it should be free to them, as in somebody else should pay for it. Unless you want to wait a long time to start getting traffic from search engines, you are going to have to pay a few fees. Consider following four directories and solid value they offer in return for very reasonable fees. LookSmart Not being listed in LookSmart is like being Invisible Man. Oops. I guess that should be Invisible Person. The reality is that LookSmart reaches a larger Internet audience than any other entity. Because they supply search results to such portals as CNN, MSN, Excite and AltaVista as well as through their own search site, LookSmart is able to expose your site to over 77% of Internet population, or in round numbers, 58 million people. That's an impossible market penetration to ignore. If your site is non-commercial, you can submit your site for a listing at no charge. However, there is no guarantee as to when, or even if your site will get reviewed. If your site is commercial in nature, or if you want to get listed quickly in order to start your traffic flow, you have two options. Option 1 allows you to submit for a review that is guaranteed to occur within 8 weeks. The fee is $99 US. Option 2 costs $199 US and you are guaranteed to have your review within 48 hours. This is fastest path you will find to long-term, free traffic as fee is one time only. These options do not guarantee that you will be listed in LookSmart directory, but rather a guarantee that your site will be considered with stated time frame. GoTo.com GoTo.com started whole business of paid listings. Their model was unique when it launched. Site owners don't pay for listings - they pay for each visitor GoTo sends them as a result of site's listing.
|
