SEO (6) Link Farming,FFA and Mousetrapping

SEO Spam-Link farming

Link farming is the process of artificially inflating the inbound links to the website by organized exchange of links. The reciprocal linking program can be abused by exchanging links with other websites which are not related to the content or the theme of the website.

SEO Spam-FFA

Free for all web pages are usually pages which have hardly any content except links to other websites. FFA is a malicious technique to inflate link popularity.

SEO Spam-Mousetrapping

Mousetrapping uses JavaScript handlers to open up new windows with content that is of no interest to the visitor. The visitor is prevented from leaving the site. Whenever the visitor tries to close the window another window opens. Sometimes, mousetrapping is programmed to end after a finite number of new browser windows. Otherwise, the visitor will have to close the browser program using the Task manager, thus losing all other open windows.
Search engine spam is directly related to the evolution of search engine algorithms. Spammers come up with new strategies every day to adapt to restrictions imposed by search engines. Search engines try to isolate these strategies and penalize websites participating in spam. It is best not to use any spamming methods to increase popularity of one’s website.

article by SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND MARKETING by Binoy Varghese page 51-52

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SEO (5) Excessive Popups,Inflating link Popularity and ALT Stuffing

SEO Spam-Excessive popups
Yahoo specifies that they consider excessive popups as spam. This is related to mousetrapping. Hence a website should have a maximum of 1 to 2 popup’s per page.

SEO Spam-Inflating link popularity
Internal link popularity can be inflated by creating an infinite amount of dynamically created web pages with content of little use to point to popular web pages within the site, thereby inflating the internal inbound links of the web pages. This tends to increase the PageRank of the intended web pages.

SEO Spam-ALT stuffing
This is a special case of keyword stuffing. Like the input tag, the ALT attribute is almost invisible from the visitor. The visitor sees the content of the ALT attribute only when the mouse is over the image. This attribute can be manipulated to have a very long string of keywords which have no relevance to the image or the webpage. This increases the keyword density of the web page

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SEO (4) Pagejacking and Domain Duplication

SEO Spam -Pagejacking

Pagejacking or content duplication is the practice of copying content (HTML source code) from another site and creating duplicate copies of web pages on one’s site. These illegitimate web pages are indexed by spiders and show up in search engine results. The spammer uses these pages to attract visitors. The visitors are tricked into thinking that the illegal site is the site they are looking for. Once on the site, the visitors may become victims of mousetrapping.


SEO Spam -Domain duplication

The practice of creating identical websites with the only difference that they have different domain names is termed as domain duplication. This would enable the websites to occupy multiple listings in the search engine results on the same page. Since these web pages are identical, their rankings will more or less be the same. The visitor is thus tricked into visiting the same content from search engine results since adjoining listings point to the same content.

article by SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND MARKETING by Binoy Varghese page 50

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SEO (3) IP Cloaking and Doorway Pages

SEO Spam -IP Cloaking

IP Cloaking is the practice of creating specialized web pages with the intention of serving search engine spiders. These web pages are invisible to normal visitors. The pages are programmed to detect whether the URL request is coming from a regular browser or a search engine spider and serve each request with different page content. The end result is that the spider sees a highly optimized web page with a heavy keyword density while the visitor is served with the regular page.

SEO Spam -Doorway pages

Doorway pages serve as a bridge for the spider. The doorway pages are created for the same purpose as cloaking only that they are served to all incoming requests. The doorway page has a meta refresh tag which will redirect the visitor to the appropriate page or a link that the visitor has to click to reach the destination. Doorway pages are also used to inflate link popularity

article by SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND MARKETING by Binoy Varghese page 49

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SEO (2) Spamming Techniques and Hidden Text

SEO Spamming techniques

Below are the different types of spamming methods that have been used to improve rankings.
1. Hidden text
2. IP Cloaking
3. Doorway pages
4. Pagejacking
5. Domain duplication
6. Excessive popup
7. Inflating link popularity
8. ALT stuffing
9. Link farming
10. FFA
11. Mousetrapping


SEO Spam Hidden text

Hidden text or keyword stuffing is the practice of overloading a webpage with keywords and key phrases. These are invisible to the visitor but are present in the body of the webpage. Since search engines read the HTML source code of web pages, this text is visible to the spider. The spider is manipulated to believe that due to the high occurrence of keyword in the content of the web page, the web page is highly relevant to the keyword and hence assigns a higher ranking to this webpage. Various techniques can be employed to inflate the density of keywords. Most prominent among these are:
1. Hidden input tag

2. Invisible text
This is done by rendering the color of the font with the background color of the web page so that these characters are invisible to the naked eye

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SEO (1) Search Engine Spam

Search engine spam

Manipulation of web pages to improve rakings in search engine results is defined as search engine spam. Guidelines that are considered as search engine abuse have been outlined by industry leading search engines. They are available at:

• Google www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
• Yahoo! Search help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html
• MSN Search search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx

Consequences of spamming

Spammers are constantly reinventing techniques to outdo spam control set forth by search engines. Nevertheless, search engines constantly upgrade their spam policies with constant modifications to their algorithms. Since the algorithms are proprietary, there is no definite way of knowing what a search engine considers spam. On detection of a website as an offender/abuser, the search engines may penalize the website or even remove the site from the index. Once blacklisted as a spammer, the website will not be crawled by the spider. One needs to communicate with search engine staff to get the website back into the crawling index. This process of communication between the website owner and the search engine staff is time consuming thus costing the owner valuable traffic and new clients.

article by SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND MARKETING by Binoy Varghese page 46-47

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SEO (20) Visitor Analysis and Frameset

Visitor analysis

One more for SEO search engine optimation is Visitor Analysis is an important part of website maintenance. www.statcounter.com (US$ 29 per month) is a paid service that maintains website statistics. Website statistics gives in depth information about the geographical location of visitors, search terms used to reach the website, referring websites, popular web pages, Operating system, monitor resolution, browser information and time spent on the website by each visitor and peak traffic hours during each day. This information can be utilized to cater to different types of visitors with their individual needs which would add value to the time spent by the visitor on the site. An example would be the monitor resolution of the visitor. This information can be used to tune up the site so that minimum scrolling is needed. Another benefit would be to keep a check that the server never goes down during peak traffic hours.

Frameset

Search engines tend to dislike websites with frames. Frames have their inherent problems like book marking. A visitor who wants to bookmark a specific page on a website using frames is unable to do so. Search engines view pages using frames as different web pages even though it might visually appear as a single page. Hence the search engine may misunderstand the content of the webpage even though it might make perfect sense to the visitor. Though there are solutions to make a website using frames to display similar contents to the visitor as well as the search engine, it is better to avoid using frames altogether.

article by SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND MARKETING by Binoy Varghese page 45-46

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SEO (19) 404 Error page and 301 Redirection

404 Error page

A 404 error page states that the page cannot be found. The spider receives this page from the server in response to a valid URL request. This page along with all rankings will be dropped from the search engine index. Moreover, the spider makes no attempt to crawl the website on receiving this page. Customize the 404 error page, typically with a sitemap to ensure successful crawling of all other web pages by the spider.

301 Redirection

301 Redirection is a spider/visitor friendly strategy to redirect one webpage to another for websites hosted on Apache servers. 301 Redirection is implemented by specifying the source and destination URLs in the .htaccess file. 301 Redirection is interpreted as “moved permanently”. This is required to ensure stability of PageRank for the site. Google interprets http://www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com as two different URLs. As a result, Google assigns different PageRank to same web pages depending on whether they have www in the domain name. This causes the PageRank for mysite.com to be distributed between http://mysite.com and http://www.mysite.com. Implementing a 301 redirect from http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com will ensure that all pages will be indexed as http://www.mysite.com/myexample.htm. One should pay close attention to ensure that all link building strategies use www in the URL like:

1. “Link to Us” page

2. Search engine and directory submissions

3. Reciprocal linking code

4. Absolute URLs within the site

source:SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND MARKETING by Binoy Varghese page 42-43

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SEO (18) Search engine friendly URL

Search engine friendly URL

Many websites have dynamically generated content. Content is dynamically generated in most cases by passing parameters in the URL. The URL in case of a dynamic webpage resembles http://www.mysite.com/index.php?pageid=70. This URL will be indexed by a search engine. However, there is often more than one parameter attached to the URL like sort order, navigation setting. Hence different URLs end up pointing to the same webpage.

http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php?pageid=70&orderby=hitsD (Hits Descending)

http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php?pageid=70&orderby=hitsA (Hits Ascending)

http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php?pageid=70&orderby=titleD (Title Descending)

http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php?pageid=70&orderby=titleA (Title Ascending)

There is no way for the search engine to justify which parameter identifies a new page and which parameter is a setting that does not justify indexing the URL as a new page. Hence spiders have been programmed to detect and ignore dynamic pages. This can be resolved by making the URL search engine friendly by replacing the database characters (#&*!%) with equivalent search engine friendly terms or characters. The above four URLs can be made search engine friendly as follows:

http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php/pageid.70/orderby.hitsD

http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php/pageid.70/orderby.hitsA

http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php/pageid.70/orderby.titleD

http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php/pageid.70/orderby.titleA

The webpage is indexed since the spider is fooled into believing that since the URL does not contain a database character, it is not a dynamic webpage. This might be an intermediate solution adopted by search engine spiders until there is technique that will allow spiders to index dynamic web pages, since the problem of isolating unique pages from their clones is not resolved by generating search engine friendly URL. This type of conversion between dynamic URL to search engine friendly URL and vice-versa can be achieved on almost all types of servers either by proper configuration or installing third party software. One should communicate with their hosting service provider to know more about the software/server configuration available to generate search engine friendly URL. The website code may have to be modified to generate search engine friendly URL in each anchor tag that is parsed by the API.

Mod_rewrite module in Apache server is used to make a URL search engine friendly. A URL request for “http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php/pageid.70/orderby.hitsD” may be translated by mod_rewrite to

“http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php?pageid=70&orderby=hitsD“

depending on the regular expression specified.

The web programmer will have modify the script to generate URL’s of the type

“http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php/pageid.70/orderby.hitsD”

instead of “http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php?pageid=70&orderby=hitsD”

within the web pages so that all URLs on the website are search engine friendly.

source:SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND MARKETING by Binoy Varghese page 37-38

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SEO (17) Outbound links

Outbound links

Outbound links may improve the ranking of a website as long as the website is citing good websites. Good websites are the ones which have been recognized as authorities in the industry relevant to the website. Outbound links may cause PageRank Leak as discussed in the preceding chapter. If one is following a reciprocal linking program, PageRank Leak can be minimized by masking the destination URL of outbound links using JavaScript code or using the NOINDEX NOFOLLOW property in the Robots Meta Tag. This is not an ethical practice but is followed by some websites. An ethical solution would be to maintain outbound links to a few authoritative and related websites. Avoid linking to websites which follow the practice of masking URL in a reciprocal linking program as this would cause a PageLeak with no worthwhile benefit.

Reciprocal linking and link building

Reciprocal Linking is a strategy to gain inbound links from websites that share the same idea as one’s website and provide an outbound link in exchange. This strategy improves the link popularity of a website. Link popularity can be defined as number and quality of inbound links to a website. Reciprocal linking is done by searching for websites that share the same idea and requesting for an inbound link in exchange for an outbound link. These websites should be rich in keywords and phrases that are emphasized on one’s website. Before starting a reciprocal linking strategy one should have the following web pages in place. They are:

1. A webpage which contains outbound links to websites (Link directory). This webpage should be linked from the homepage so that it gets indexed by the search engine spider.

2. A “Link to Us” page which gives cut and paste HTML code to link to one’s website.

Once these pages are in place, one should send emails to webmasters of short listed sites expressing interest in reciprocal linking. Key points to ask in this email are whether they would allow placing an outbound link on one’s website and if so, do they expect a specific format (text link, image, flash movie, etc.) and the HTML code that should be used for an inbound link. A text link will be most effective as an inbound link. Pay close attention to the link text in the anchor tag.

Zeus by cyber-robotic.com is a highly effective reciprocal link building software (Cost US$ 195). Zeus is a robot/spider which crawls the internet to find websites that have similar themes as one’s website. Once the list of sites is compiled, Zeus can be used to send personalized email messages to webmasters of these websites, track and maintain the details of each site. It dynamically generates keyword tuned link directory pages which can be uploaded to one’s website.

CPA affiliate programs provided by third parties like Commission Junction may bring qualified leads to one’s website. But if a website hosts its own CPA program, it serves a dual purpose. Not only does an affiliate program bring qualified leads, but also indirectly builds inbound links to the website. iDevAffiliate v4.0 Gold Edition (Cost US$ 149) by idevdirect.com is a popular software used by many merchants to host their own affiliate programs. One can promote their affiliate program by submitting to affiliate program directories, specifying the terms of their affiliate program.

source:SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND MARKETING by Binoy Varghese page 35-36

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SEO (16) Inbound links

Inbound links

For Google, inbound links help determine the PageRank of a website. Without any inbound links, a website is practically invisible to the search engine. One way for the search engine spider to index a website is by following inbound links from another indexed website. The alternative is to manually submit the website to the search engine spider’s crawling list. Though manual submission is encouraged, there is never a guarantee that the website will be indexed. On the other hand if there are inbound links from other sites, it is more predictable that the website will be indexed.

Inbound links from the following sources help in improving ranking of a web page

1. All major and local directories; Yahoo, DMOZ, LookSmart, trade, business and industry related directories

2. Suppliers, happy customers, sister companies and Partners

3. Websites which provide accompanying services

e.g. Inbound links from web hosting companies for a site selling website templates

4. Related websites but not competing websites

e.g. Websites that provide tutorials about web design and modification of website templates

5. Competing websites

Not all inbound links have the same weightage. Links from authoritative industry sources count more towards improving page ranks than links from a small private website. Some inbound links may have a negative effect on the PageRank. These are:

1. Links from FFA (Free for all) link pages

2. Link farms

Link farming is the process of organized exchanging of unrelated links between websites.

3. Links from doorway pages

Doorway pages are web pages created with the intent of inflating the inbound links of a website. These pages are created with the sole purpose of serving search engine spiders with optimized content which may boost the ranking of the webpage.

4. Links from discussion forms

Discussion forums can be maliciously used to inflate the inbound links to a website. Given a good but unmoderated message board, spammers may include messages to their spam pages as part of seemingly innocent messages they post. In a moderated message board, spammers post valid messages with links to their websites in their signatures.

Most search engines penalize websites which employ malicious techniques to inflate link popularity to the extent of removing the website from the index.

source:SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND MARKETING by Binoy Varghese page 33-35

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