Basic SEO: Tricks and Tips - Doorways and Redirects
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It's important to understand the difference between a doorway page an information page. Doorway pages are bad, information pages are good. Got it? Good, let's go have a beer. But seriously, the difference is much more ambiguous. By definition, doorway pages are overly optimized for search engines and are used simply as a means to direct traffic to your site. An information page is used to advertise your site and its affiliates and is actually useful for both the visitor and the search engine. The key word here is "useful," because determining whether a page is useful is always in the eye of the beholder. But if you're honest, and stop trying to kid yourself, you can tell whether you really created the page for your site's visitors or the search engines.
Redirects and cloaking are some of the more notorious techniques web developers use to get their site indexed. They are essentially the same thing in that they both involve showing one page to the search engine and a different page to the visitor. This can be a touchy subject because there are some web developers who feel that the limits of the search algorithms are forcing them to design their sites specifically for the search engines. Adding more fuel to the fire is the fact that search engines have trusted feeds (a legal form of cloaking), which will guarantee that your site is indexed, if you pay them.
A redirect is when you click to load a web page and the loaded page immediately disappears, only to have a new one appear in its stead. It can best be done by using JavaScript to either automatically grab the page within a split second or grab the page when a user action (e.g. a mouseover event) triggers it. In the past, people used the REFRESH meta tag, but search engines have long since caught on to this technique and will ignore the redirect page and move on to the destination page.
Cloaking is a bit more sophisticated and is harder for search engines to detect, although it certainly isn't undetectable. It generally works by having a cloaking program identify the searchbot requesting the page (if it is a searchbot and not a browser) and sending a different, better optimized page. This doesn't have to be as insidious as it sounds. In my last article, I described how it can be used to show search engines dynamic pages that would otherwise be invisible. So basically, if you aren't intentionally trying to deceive the search engines, cloaking may be a viable option.
Some of you may think all of these methods are unethical no matter what. Well, have no fear. In the next section, I'm going to discuss the more legitimate ways to create relevant content and optimize your web page.
Next: How to Get Content >>
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