Doorway pages and search engine ranking

What are doorway pages?

These are dynamically generated pages depending upon the user's search, mostly used to fool the search engines by spam.

Wikipedia's definition about doorway pages:

Doorway pages are web pages that are created for spamdexing, this is, for spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending visitors to a different page. They are also known as bridge pages, portal pages, zebra pages (a humorous arbitrary coinage by Jill Whalen of High Rankings Advisor), jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages and by other names. Doorway pages that redirect visitors without their knowledge use some form of cloaking.

How do search engines deal with them?

Doorway pages / orphan pages are generally used to cheat the search engines, showing that there are static pages on the site , while they are actually created on the fly and are not static pages.

Search engines currently don't have much defense, they are still learning, but they do put such pages in secondary index as most of the data is common and also take action if reported as spam.

Does it help to increase ranking ?

This is a myth that doorway pages help in ranking of a site.
Reasons:
1. You will not get the link benefit as these pages are not at all connected to other pages.
2. These pages are hardly indexed
3. This is a spamming technique which will ruin your complete site if found by search engines.

Moral of the story is : Keep away from spamming and give quality content to the visitors from a long term perspective.

Popular and not recommended SEO (Spamming) techniques

Cloaking , creatively (?) manipulated webpage display technique by cloaking softwares, is defined as showing some page to the human visitor and a different "keyword rich" and "fully optimized" page to the search engine spiders or bots for the same url.

According to Matt Cutts ( Google engineer and authority on Spam Issues) says:

Cloaking is serving different content to users than to search engines. It’s interesting that you don’t see all that much cloaking to deliver spam these days. If you see people doing spam, they tend to rely on sneaky redirects (often via JavaScript) more than cloaking. For example, a blackhat might make a doorway or keyword stuffed/gibberish page plus something like a JavaScript redirect to go to a completely different page.

Is this bad ? Can I get banned for using Cloaking?
If the two pages which are being shown to the user and the search bot are totally different and are meant to do the different intentionally in order to gain more search engine ranking advantage. The fooling attempt will be returned bye a minus penalty and even banning the website is definately a possibility.

One special case is of Flash Files (.swf) which "were" previously not able to get "read" by the search engine ( now also its Google who claims to read the flash), a div with the alternate text data can be placed.

Trying to fool the search engines is begging to get banned!!

Link Baiting :
Engage into a contraversy un-necessarily just to put a focus on yourself :
How ?
Well, you can write on the latest burning issues, comment on the current happening, if you still have more daring , go challenge someone and prove him wrong ...

People will reply in anger, support, disgust and thus it will be in the book marking sites with a lot of interactive posts and fight will begin.

Some people try throwing their opinions and views without giving any troubles to the grey matter, whats amazing is they claim success too..

After all every publicity is a good publicity ( this is not my thought !!)

Blu - Ray site Hacked!!

Competition and use of black hat techniques by someone (nothing proved yet so no blame game) but the fact is Blu-Ray website was hacked and it was re-directing to HD DVD site.

Tech2 news suggests:
The war between Blu-Ray and HD DVD has been carrying on in full swing this entire year. There have been a lot of charges traded and numbers proclaimed, about who is winning the format war. Carrying the war to the next level, an HD DVD enthusiast hacked the Blu-Ray website and re-directed it to the HD DVD website.

Which software do you use?

When it comes to Corporate and Business deals/operations, most of us would agree that a licensed software is a must.
It not only affects the performance and lowering the downtime, but also boosts confidence while dealing with overseas clients and meeting the expectations.Especially the Marketing personel has to face the Music if any doubts raising the authentic software and the permissions are concerned. After all marketing ( online or offline) shows you how responsible businessmen and further citizen you can be.

Rediff News has some more info:
Illegal and unlicensed software installations continue to be a problem and source of revenue loss for software companies worldwide.

In fact, 55 per cent of the executives interviewed estimated their firms' losses at greater than 10 per cent of the total revenue, according to a recent survey by KPMG, the audit, tax and advisory firm.

The picture is grim in India too, with 50 per cent of the software in use being pirated.

Overall, 87 per cent of the executives claimed a revenue loss due to unlicensed use.

What's more, 77 per cent of those surveyed agreed with the International Data Corporation estimate that 35 per cent of the installed software is unlicensed, leading to an estimated $34 billion in lost revenue to the industry.

The solution to S/W Piracy and pirated software is the "Cost" which most of the individuals cant afford in Non-Advanced countries. Software companies want to take out the revenues spent in development and earn profit, thats obvious; but the customer focus is lacking here.If the price-value relationship is re-considered to the requirements of small business owners, its a definite possibility that the menace can be eliminated/reduced to a larger extent.
Yes we are also forgetting about Copyrights and IPR ( Intellectual Property Rights) here!

Cybercrime - Phishing - Latest India Case

Cybercrimes and phishing are the latest in the world and specially countries like India have to be ready of such hacking activities for the sole purpose of getting rich quickly. Well its good to get money but the way to get it will take you behind bars if its not legal.Many half-learnt and brilliant people who lack integrity for nation and human values happen to be at the receiving end when cyber cops take action.

A news says:
In a major breakthrough, Karnataka's Cyber Crime police of the Corps of Detectives arrested seven people, who allegedly hacked various bank accounts on Internet and siphoned off close to Rs 12 lakhs (Rs 1.2 million).
The kingpin of the racket, Joseph, an unemployed techie hailing from Virudunagar in Madurai district of Tamil Nadu, was nabbed from a cyber cafe in Mahadevapura near Whitefield by the police on November 29. Six of his associates have also been nabbed.
The police tracked the accused by tracing the IP address of the PC from where the accounts were hacked.

Read the whole story here.

One more Indian Government site Hacked by an anti-US

Another Hacking activity detected on one of the Government site, causing the hosting providers and the webmasters to re-think on the security issues.

New Delhi: The Goa government was in for an online shock on Saturday when its Information and Publicity Department’s website was hacked allegedly by a Turkish group that posted anti-America slogans on it.The website, which was designed to display information on the details of Goa administration and related information and government schemes was flooded with graphic images of executions and arms seizure.State Information Secretary in-charge J P Singh was quoted as saying by PTI that the matter was a serious one and will be looked into.According to Government watchdog CERTIN, close to 3,000 Indian websites have been hacked this year, 140 in October alone. In September, Google mail accounts of key government officials were tampered with and earlier, passwords and login names of the National Defence Academy and key Indian embassies were splashed by a hacker on this website. Goa police say the alleged hacker Huseyingazi has cross-linked the website to www.turkmilliyetcileri.net which flashes anti-America slogans, police said. One of the comments reads, "United States of America which is feeding on and strengthening behind close doors the universal terrorists is the greatest terrorist country."

Full Story here

Community Site Orkut Physically Targetted in India

In the case of latest Hack and penetration into your computer, some cyber cafe's are facing a strange experience. Google's Social Marketing site Orkut is forcefully blocked using some script with a message like this with sound!


I asked a cafe owner and according to him people do come and put in the code personally. Its not publicly claimed that this act is by whom, but one thing is for sure, it will be creating more problems atleast in earning and formatting the PCs.

This seems to be a virus developed in VB, which collects the character values of these 5 ( o r k u t) and not let users use it anywhere in the browser.

Lets see if Google comes out with the Anti-Virus Solution to save his own Orkut....

Please let me know your views on this and how we can manage everything peacefully without hurting any one's sentiments.

Search Optimization and Spamming

Search Engine Spamming:

Over-stuffing of words/information using illegal means and practices mostly to attain unfair or "instant" advantage for more visibility and to increase the search engine rankings.
Black hat techniques used by webmasters for such spamming make the search engines still vulnerable as those algos find it difficult to differentiate from genuine content and stuffed words.

Examples of Search engine spamming include :
- Too much words placed
- Hidden Text or micro text
- Doorway Pages
- Mirror Pages/ Mirror Sites
- Sites that contain only advertisements and no content at all

Google Spam:

Google Information Guidelines for Webmasters provides information about what techniques to avoid on Google Network.

Yahoo Spam:

Yahoo's information Guidelines for webmasters about what search engine optimization tricks to avoid on Yahoo!