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Next: Keywords Jump PagesIt is difficult to cover all your keyword bases in a single page, optimize for various search engine algorithms and keep the text coherent for human readers. A common solution is to create alternative versions of the same page. These pages go under many names, Doorway, Hallway, Bridge, Gateway and Entry Pages are often bandied about, especially by SEO businesses, often to obfuscate their intentions. At their simplest Jump Pages are targeted at a few keywords and designed purely to rank well in search engines. A user clicking on the page will be presented with some hyperlink text inviting him into the rest of the site. Porn sites pioneered and continue to use this technique. A user may search for the name of an actress, the page features the name of the actress repeated many times usually interspersed with other words such as 'nude' and 'pictures'. The page then has links to adult content sites, although rarely featuring the aforementioned lady. Okay I know what you are thinking but it is a tough job and someone has to check this stuff. This is a classic bait and switch tactic. The problem with this is that it is all too obvious to end users. The conversion rate is not going to be very high and sites using this technique have to rely on quantity, creating thousands of doorways. It is also easy for competitors to see the successful pages and copy the techniques with few or little changes. Duplicate page algorithms mean that many of the copied doorways will be dropped from the search engine index. Meta RefreshThe first improvement to the basic scheme is to use a META Refresh tag with a zero second delay. This is the jump. The user probably won't be able to see the optimized content before being sent elsewhere. These META tags are also a red flag to search engines that something may be wrong with the page. Because jump pages manipulate results and clutter indexes with redundant text they are banned by search engines. TrafficPower, a major SEO firm used a technique that they called Search Engine Entry Pages that they claimed would get clients into Google's Top Ten but allegedly ended up getting their clients banned from Google and Yahoo! Javascript RedirectsOther tactics for redirecting users while leaving search engine robots to index the optimized content have been developed. The aim, as ever, is to keep at least one step ahead of the experts at the search engine companies. One example is the use of Javascript, a popular Web programming language. Search engines don't understand Javascript, building this knowledge into search engine robots would make them too complicated and slow. Javascript can be used to load a fresh page when a certain action occurs. TrafficPower used Javascript onmousover() events to trigger the redirect. Some sharp eyed surfers discovered that Microsoft was using doorway pages for certain parts of its website. The pages contained densely formatted, keyword rich text that was obviously not designed to be read by humans. Each page included a function in an external Javascript file:
At the head of the page a call was made to the function with the following code:
The key part is the call to location.replace(URL) which loads the new contents.
As a final protection the doorway page includes a directive telling search engines not to archive the keyword rich content. The pages had been created by an SEO company. French holiday firm VVF <http://www.hiver.vvf-vacances.fr> has also used this service. The discovery of these pages has lead people to ask why, if TrafficPower and its clients got banned from Google for similar tactics why not Microsoft? This illustrates a few points
Just be aware of the risks and limitations of using doorway pages. Even if Javascript redirects cause current search engine robots some trouble jump pages are fairly easy for humans to detect. A more advanced scheme is agent name delivery or cloaking which delivers content at the server level customized to different audiences. Some black-hatters make the point that every page on a website is a doorway or entry page and that separating search engine optimized content actually enhances the user experience. There are reasons for using doorways, for example, to enable content that cannot be indexed by robots to be found. An example would be information held in databases. This could be exported to static pages with a link to the page allowing the database to be searched dynamically. There are often better ways to achieve this than jump pages. As we have seen with TrafficPower and other SEO firms, jump pages are a mainstay of many optimization tactics even though changes to search engine's algorithms can make them much less effective. Beware of over inflated claims such as guaranteed top ten listings for competitive search terms:
Many of these businesses use software packages to machine generate pages. An example of such a package is WebPosition Gold <www.web-positiongold.com/> (WPG). This package features a template that the webmaster fills in with target keywords and other text. The Page Generator then creates a pages that are supposed to be tailored for different search engines predilections for on-page ranking factors. The process is quite scientific using statistical analysis of which on-page factors a search engine prefers. So far so bad but, as many people find after an algorithm update, today's top ranking pages are tomorrow's turkeys. Machine generated pages, especially ones using gibberish as filler text, are usually easier for search engine's to detect and ban. Finally, most search engines put less reliance on on-page factors. Creating a Jump PageTo give you a better idea of the process we will create a jump page by hand. There's no magic to and no need for expensive software. You can use a tool such as Overture's keyword suggestions generator <http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/>. For this exercise we will target the term SEO. Overture gives a list of alternative keyword phrases and the frequency that they were queries in the previous month. For our term we got a list of about 100 phrases. We'll use the top ten, although one could include the whole list.
By cutting and pasting the list into Excel or Word the count column can be deleted leaving a list of phrases.
A page consisting of just these terms would look a bit odd and would probably trigger some keyword stuffing filters on search engines. They need to be mixed up with some other text to give a keyword density of around 20%. If you are a dab hand at programming a simple Perl script could be used to generate the content using any text as the source.
Here we've used part of Shakespeare's Henry Vth as source text. It is out of copyright. Around 300 - 600 words with the list of phrases repeated some 5 to 10 times should do and each phrase should be included in Headers and the Title. It would also be worth generating some hyperlinks with strong anchors through to different pages on the site. Of course the text makes no sense to a human reader but a search engine would have to perform some pretty good semantic analysis to know that. Remember that jump pages can get your site banned so do this at your risk and peril.
See Also
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