[thelist] More on Search Engines

[Jeff Howden]

russ,

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> From: Russ
>
> There's a company (http://www.brainfusionstudios.com)
> out there that has performed a "trick" that appears as
> if it won't get them into trouble with the search
> engines, because it's somewhat legit from a spider's
> view--at least in my understanding of how spiders work.
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it's not legit.  it's a doorway page.  it's sole purpose is to be spider
food.  if that weren't the case, there wouldn't be a need for the "tricky"
css or the instant js redirect.  ask any seo expert with an ounce of ethics
(if you can find one) and they'll call it spam.

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> The real link (since the above is timing out for me)
> redirects you through
> http://brainfusionstudios.com/sales/denvergraphicdesign.htm.
> This page uses some type of technology (I'm guessing
> CGI) that actually writes text to the page based upon
> what you've searched/clicked on--in this case,
> denvergraphicdesign--populates the copy on the page
> accordingly.
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it'd be impossible/pointless to write the page based on your search words
seeing as how search engines don't perform searches and they don't pass
referers.

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> There's a div with an ID of "zyx".  "zyx" comes from a
> linked style sheet at:
> http://brainfusionstudios.com/zyx.css.
>
> That style is:  #zyx { position:absolute; left:-405px;
> top:-210px; width:400px; height:200px; z-index:1}
>
> What brainfusionstudios.com has done is placed copy at
> -405, -210--that's right, above and to the left of your
> browsers viewable space--so that you cannot see it with
> a modern browser. [...]
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i'm not sure i see the point of going through these css contortions to begin
with since they're just doing an instant redirect via js anyway.

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> This is somewhat of a risk for anyone viewing the pages
> with a text browser (lynx viewer version:
> http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fbrainfusionstud
> ios.com%2Fsales%2Fdenvergraphicdesign.htm) as they'll
> get to see everything on the page, however...
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what's an even greater risk is that anyone with js that ends up on one of
these doorway pages will have a difficult time finding their way to a
functional page of the site.

what's sad is that it looks like they've combined *all* the copy from every
functional page on their site, tossed in some locals into the mix and spray
painted every one of these doorway pages with the copy.  duplicate copy
*will* get them penalized by google.  it's only a matter of time.

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> They've created TONS of links to themselves this way--
> probably unbeknownst to some of their clients and to the
> rest of the world, but it should increase their link
> popularity and their site popularity WITHOUT appearing
> to be directing everything to one single page since
> the content gets rewritten, as well.
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unfortunately for them, link popularity doesn't count nearly as much when
you're linking to yourself, especially when all the pages with all the links
are all doorway pages.  how can you, or rather a search engine, tell they're
doorway pages?  simple, take an inventory of all the pages on the site and
draw lines between all the pages that have links to each other with arrows
showing which direction the link is going.  it becomes apparent relatively
quick which ones are functional and which ones are doorway pages.

on a side-note, i found the constant click-redirect behavior on that site
very annoying.  they don't even have the decency to use the replace() method
in js so the page i'm redirected from isn't in my browser history.  i can
only imagine what damage this "genius" must do to the site statistics.
*shrug*

when it comes to search engine ranking, imo, it comes down to the same old
thing that's the draw for real-live viewers, content, content, content.
look at evolt.org.  zero search engine promotion.  yet there are numerous
search terms that we come up in the top 5 results.

.jeff

------------------------------------------------------
Jeff Howden - Web Application Specialist
Resume - http://jeffhowden.com/about/resume/
Code Library - http://evolt.jeffhowden.com/jeff/code/