Re: Automatic redirects on doorway pages?

From: Michael Martinez <Michael_at_xenite.org>
Date: Mon 11 Sep 2000 11:16:30 -0500

PHILIP MAK <mfraser_at_SEAS.GWU.EDU> WROTE:
> I had an idea about implementing an automatic redirect
> for doorway pages on my site. I could setup a server
> side script that checks the visitor's referring URL. If
> the referring URL is from a search engine, then it can
> send a redirect to the real page. Otherwise, it can
> show the doorway page (which would also hopefully be
> seen by the search engine spider).
>
> Is the referring URL a reliable method of determining
> whether someone came from a search engine?

What you're proposing is an ineffective strategy for
implementing what is called "cloaking".

The search engines have been trying to filter out
cloaked sites for years. They do so with some
success. Their reason for filtering out the cloaked
sites is that they feel they are being deceptive. You
are, in fact, trying to get a high ranking with page
"A" for content on page "B", so the search engines
will be fooled into sending people to pages that they
don't expect to see.

The people who successfully engage in cloaking rarely
give out explicit information. That is because they
have been burned for many reasons. I cannot advise
you on how to do it or where to find hard information.

You may, however, want to look at some of the expert
sites which discuss ways of optimizing for search
engines without breaking the rules.

http://www.searchenginewatch.com/

http://www.searchengineforums.com/

http://webmasterworld.com/

There are other good forums and resources, as well, but
these are the three I am most familiar with, and I
moderated a forum at searchengineforums.com for a
while.

Good advice on Web site design and optimization can be
found at http://www.jimworld.com/ (which is run by Jim
Wilson, who also owns the search engine forums).

Search Engine Watch is owned and operated by Danny
Sullivan, regarded by most knowledgeable people to be
the world's leading expert on search engine
technology.

Webmasterworld is owned and operated by Brett Tabke, a
widely respected expert who has tracked search engine
trends and publishes hard data on an occasional basis.

Doorway pages in general are being frowned upon by
these communities, largely because the traditional
doorways (small pages with hardly any content except a
few targeted keywords optimized for 5-10% of content in
about 200 words of text) have gotten thousands of
domains banned or ranked considerably lower at Alta
Vista, Inktomi, and Google earlier this year (in fact,
Alta Vista began its massive onslaught against doorways
last October 25). And doorways are routinely ignored
by directories anyway.

The conventional wisdom these days is to concentrate on
three areas:

1) Develop content-rich pages which double as doorways.
They will not rank as well as the old traditional
doorways, but if you use them to sell your products
and services you stand a better chance of getting and
keeping customers, many of whom are irritated by
deceptive doorways. Content-rich pages make use of
fast-loading graphics and navigational tables to look
like normal content pages, and they contain links to
other parts of the domain. But they also provide
critical, hype-free information which is written to
gain a good ranking where possible. Targeted keyword
phrases are used in the title tag, the keywords and
description meta tags, and at least one header or
large size font tag near the top of the page, as well
as once or twice in the body text (generally advised to
be in the 200-500 word length range), and once near
the bottom of the page.

The concept of the content-rich doorway was developed
on the assumption that any indexable page naturally
acts like a doorway to a Web site anyway. So if you
have 1,00 products on 1,000 Web pages, you potentially
have 1,00 doorway pages (they just aren't optimized,
normally, for search engine rankings -- so the idea is
to take what content a Web site would normally have
and optimize it like doorways).

2) Develop theme-based sites. A "theme" is an
identifiable keyword phrase which is found on all the
pages of a Web site. If you have 10 pages, and you
want the theme to be for "widget sales", then "widget
sales" should appear on each of the pages, once near
the top and once near the bottom. One of the pages
will be given a fairly high ranking for the targeted
and related phrases. The built-in navigational system
should AT LEAST make it easy for people to find out
what the site is about, to search the site, or get to
a site map.

3) Get as many in-bound links as you can, especially
from high-quality sites. Recent studies have shown
that "link farms" or "automated link exchange
managers" do not help. The search engines have begun
identifying the pages that these services generate and
simply ignore them. What you want is to exchange
links with as many legitimate sites that have similar
content to your own as possible. More importantly, you
want to exchange links with sites that rank
consistently in the top 10-20 positions for the
keywords you are targeting.

Many business people balk at the idea of exchanging
links with their competitors, and by doing so they
shoot themselves in the foot. Of this large
community, those in the retail business at least would
not hesitate to send their walk-in customers to a
competitive store if they didn't have something in
stock, in the hope of creating goodwill that will
result in the potential customer returning. The same
effect has been shown to work on the Web for large and
small sites alike, business and non-business.

Exchanging links with competitive sites not only helps
boost your rankings with search engines like Alta
Vista, Google, and Inktomi, it helps ensure that
people will find your site despite your search engine
rankings.

An alternative to exchanging links with competitors
(although it's a poor substitute at best) is to create
an affiliate program. The affiliate program will
ensure that many sites will link back to your own.
Unfortunately, they will usually not rank highly for
your targeted search terms, so they won't boost your
link popularity with the search engines very much.
But they may drive traffic to your site in and of
themselves.

Most affiliate programs experience only 5%
effectiveness. That is, only 5% of the affiliates
drive significant sales. Some businesses have
developed targeted affiliate programs, attempting to
prequalify Web sites for inclusion in their programs.
I have no real information on whether this works or
for which industries if there is any sort of curve.

Nonetheless, you're much better off with 1,000 in-bound
links from sites that send you only 1 visitor each per
year than with no in-bound links or only 10 in-bound
links from sites that send you fewer than 100 visitors
each per year. Of course, these numbers are arbitrary,
and one could say, "I'll settle for 50 sites which
send me 500 visitors per year." Good luck finding
those 50.

The best affiliate programs are also those which are
run directly by the retail sites. That is, going
through a third-party affiliate program is not as
effective as managing your own. The downside of
managing your own is the cost and time it requires.
The downside of going through an affiliate manager,
besides the fact it will be less effective overall, is
that the links will not boost your link popularity --
they will all go back to the link manager's site, not
yours.

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Received on Mon Sep 11 2000 - 11:16:30 CDT