SEO guide by Blurbpoint.

[Raunaq Rayait]

This thread is dedicated to Search Engine Optimization and all its basic questions.

Contents -

Introduction

* What is SEO?
* What's the difference between SEO and SEM?
* What's the difference between paid and organic search listings?
* What's on-page SEO?
* What's off-page SEO?
* How quickly will I see results?
* Should I rank my own content or articles on other sites?

Advanced SEO

* What other factors affect rankings besides backlinks?
* Does domain age help?
* What is rel="canonical" & 301 Redirect?
* What's the truth about duplicate content?
* What is a doorway page/cloaking?
* What are meta tags?
* What is the "freshness" factor?
* What is a C-class IP and why should I care?
* What is LSI?
* Should I build links for human beings or the search engines?
* What is an XML Sitemap?
* What's the sandbox?
* What is robots.txt for?
* What's a spamblog?
* What's an autoblog?
* What's an "authority" site?
* What are "supplemental" results?

What is Page Rank?

* What is Page Rank?
* How often does Google update Page Rank?
* Does PR matter?
* What is the "Google Dance"?
* How does Google personalize my results?

Essential's of Link Building

* What is a backlink?
* What is anchor text?
* What is a do-follow/no-follow link?
* Types of backlinks?
* Can paid links harm my ranking?
* Are reciprocal links bad?
* What is a one-way link?
* What is three-way linking?
* What is a site wide link?
* What is pinging?

Advanced Link Building

* What is link velocity?
* Can I build links too fast?
* What is page rank sculpting?
* What is a link wheel?
* What is a mininet?
* What makes a good site for a link wheel?
* What is link bait?
* What is a link farm?
* What is a footprint?
* How do I search for footprints?
* What is a proxy?

Indexation

* How do I get my site indexed?
* How do I get my backlinks indexed?
* How can I tell if my site has been visited by a spider/bot?

Statistics and Monitoring

* What percentage of people click on the first listing in Google?
* How do I use Google alerts to monitor the SERPs?
* How can I track the number of backlinks I have?

Keyword Research

* What makes a good keyword?
* How many people are searching for my keyword?
* What is the "true" competition for a keyword?
* What are long tail keywords?

Official Stuff

* What is the official Google/Yahoo/Bing policy on SEO?
* Why doesn't Google tell me how many links I have?
* Who is Matt Cutts?
* Google webmaster tools
* What is SEOMoz?

Search Engine Optimization Services

* Can anyone guarantee a 1st place ranking?
* What is a backlink packet?
* I bought a packet of "high pr links" but all my links are PR0, what happened?
* What automation tools are there?
* What SEO service should I use?
* What does an SEO host give me that a regular one doesn't?

Contributors

Blurbpoint Team.

[Raunaq Rayait]

What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.

In other words.
Search engine optimization or SEO is a simple activity to make sure the site can be found in the search engines for keywords and phrases related to what site is offering.

What's the difference between SEO and SEM?

Search Engine Marketing:

Search engine marketing promote sites on search engines by paying Avenues such as paid placement and paid inclusion and contextual advertising. In most definitions, the main reason for the difference between search engine optimization and search engine marketing is that the search engine marketing focuses on the aspects to earn the rank of the paid search engine.

The main difference between search engine marketing and search engine optimization is the position or gain this level through its online marketing techniques via search engines. This is known as menus, paid and not included in the membership lists in the middle of a page search engine. Are placed around the center usually, most of the contacts only on the summit and on the right, though in some search engines are on the left and wraps around the bottom as well.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

One more time, Search engine optimization focuses on the "organic" ranking of a website within a search engine. Organic rankings are the classifications that are not paid and placed in the center of the web page search engine. Search engine optimization attempts to optimize the website to increase the ranking of that website within these organic search results.

The search results that affect search engine optimization are known as organic search results because they are affected by the contents of a web site and how that content is indexed by the search engine algorithm. Many variables to search engine optimization experts have to worry about include keywords, page rank, link building and links in a website and organization.

Reaching the top of organic results can be absolutely free, at least in theory. In practice, there is a cost to get the right kind of optimized content to be indexed by search engines algorithm. Many people choose to outsource this content, although small and medium businesses without big budgets can keep at home.

What's the difference between paid and organic search listings?

Well the question is maximally covered in SEO vs SEM but still I want to give some brief explanation.

Organic search engine listings are the main results users see when they search on Google. The web sites appearing in organic listings appear because these sites are more relevant to the keywords of the user. In fact, most of these sites appear on the top of search results due to the webmasters of these sites have used SEO tactics to secure the top spots.

The payment (or "sponsored") ads often appear on the top, bottom and right of regular organic listings. Generally, it is pay per click (PPC) ads, which means that the website owner only pays when someone clicks on your ad (instead of paying for impressions).

Well if you are doing only SEO does not means that you cannot do paid advertising or vice versa.(*)But the thing you should consider that getting a paid traffic will not help your site to get higher position in Organic results.Search Engine maintains whole different logs of Paid and free traffic.

*Incoming traffic can improve your search engine ranking but paid traffic will not help you with that.

SEO traffic is free, but can be chargeable as many site owners outsource the SEO work as the industry got more and more competitive most often hiring a expert is always a right choice.

What's on-page SEO?

On page SEO is what is displayed on your web site, what users and search engines see, and what you hope will get up boosted search engine rankings. The most prominent feature of SEO on page is a copy.

If you know anything about SEO and you have to know the key to a successful SEO campaign is really a good word search. And will target keywords with no search traffic and one does not see your site - even if it is No. 1 in Google. Targeted keywords that have a lot of research and very competitive, and you will find it difficult to make any ground when it comes to the coveted first page rankings. It is important to find a balance between competition and a lot of competition is very low.

The key to SEO on the page is the quality of content - and lots of it. And can, in times gone by the site owners get away from the window of the content, or copy them to have been written by someone with less than adequate command of English. Since Google updated panda focus on quality content has never been stronger - Search all about keeping users happy - even if you inject pages of crap that no one wants to read, and it will suppress your site to the bottom of the results - even if the material is keyword rich.

Much of the copy and there are other things you can do, such as the use of tags H1, H2 and H3 (including your keyword in each), including the keyword in the title page (the domain name where possible), and to maintain type linked to the internal structure.

For those who use and is included in their platform, which was chosen to build a site on the Internet there are a few from the list of SEO there are worthwhile additions that will help you in your quest to improve your web site. They're not cheap - but it is concise and straight to the point. Remember every single component of an effective SEO on a page is difficult, so it's nice to have a visual reference on each page you can use to evaluate your site.

In Short - On page SEO can be summarized in one word - Content.

What's off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO or search engine optimization is to make things out of place to improve your search engine rankings of sites. The only thing you can do off site incraese positioning is to create more links. More links in general, lead to a better Google PageRank and better search engine rankings.>

When you are trying to get more links you have to think about quality, not all links are created equal, and links to low quality sites have little or no impact on your rankings. The best types of links you can get are from trusted sources, such as universities, newspapers and even some first-class directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo.

How quickly will I see results?

Unfortunately, search engine optimization does not yield immediate results, it is a long-term. If you are looking for a fast search engine and we must establish a pay-per-click (PPC) accounts with Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. This will get an immediate search engine exposure you're looking for when people search for your keyword phrases. PPC ads usually start on the same day you set up your display. But the influence of "free" search engines like turning an ocean liner. In turn, but the response is not immediate. With luck, you'll miss the iceburg.

Significant results usually begin to appear anywhere from weeks to a few months after it was done SEO work, depending on how well established on the site. If it is built correctly pages, links and internal links and inbound obtained from the relevant sites of high quality, and should continue to lists in a steady improvement, or at least keep (but also can be changed or even dropped as a result of variables can not be controlled) .

[Raunaq Rayait]

1) What other factors affect rankings besides backlinks?

Remember the "good old days" when the fastest way to get the rank at the top of the search stack would have more of your keywords stuffed in his text and meta tags than their competitors did? Fortunately, times have changed. Today, higher rankings are possible because of back links with authority, credibility and brand actionable content. But what they do not realize is that today's search engines can be analyzed much more than you might expect.

In fact, Google has been awarded thousands of patents to their ad networks, products of the cloud and its flagship search engine more intuitive and efficient. Combine this with other search technologies Bing billing himself as a "decision engine" and you will see that search engines are getting smarter all the time. And while none of them is exactly what analysis reveals that you are using to judge who sits where, here are some little-known factors used to analyze the pages and may affect its classification.

On-Page Behavior

What do people do once they get to your site? Does your site allow them to share a page on Twitter or Facebook? Do they can easily print or bookmark a page to read the information in future? How many people have visited your site through a link on your email or RSS feed? You already know that search engines are factoring in Twitter hashtags and Facebook likes, while the previous strategy, like the exact match domains are becoming increasingly less of an indicator of range. In fact, Facebook share on SEO get more momentum than simply liked.

Language and Keyword Density

Keep your keyword density or below a certain percentage seems to be a commandment written in stone for some vendors. But it's more about the correlation between how search engines see language used in your page, and how it relates to other pages on your site. Diversify your content, link their messages whenever possible, and give the search engine of the total circulation of one issue: the big picture and not small, intermittent "bites". This in turn makes your page more relevant and gives a higher quality score.

Brand and Association

You build a brand remarkable, or what you are linked with each other? Have shown that trends tend to favor sites that Google has the ability to connect quickly to the researchers what they want (as is the point of the search engine in the first place). Shoes? Zappos. Recipes? Food Network can be linked to these types of "entities" together with the relevant search engine product such as reviews, locations and videos. In the advanced world of internet it can be easily say that so-called "level playing field" that the Internet has been famous for - is disappearing.

Pages and Time on Site

You can often gauge how well a site is doing by the number of pages each visitor browsing, and how long they spend on the site. In fact, you can use clickstream tools such as ScrollMap CrazyEgg to see how far people are reading an article before clicking elsewhere. A small number of pages per visit and time on site could mean that either people do not find what they want on your site or its contents are not being effective. Ask yourself - "What do I do at the end of the page?" Read related articles? Share with friends on social networks? Search or coupon offers in your local area?


Server Location

This does not affect your ranking since Google and other search engines is no longer focused only on the IP address to locate your target market is coming from but may still play a role in other indicators, such as speed of loading your site (which does not affect the order). You can help Google point in the right direction by using the Webmaster Tools and geographical indications such as a listing with your address and phone number in Google places. It is clear that this information is only relevant if you have a TLD is as a country, such as. com. net, or ORG rather than the. co.uk or com.au.

Bounce Rate

This is an important factor that many people do not fully understand. A high bounce rate can indicate several things. Above all, people coming to your site are not expected to find the solution. Proper use of titles, title, and even including the keywords in landing pages can help reduce the dropout rate. The same applies if your site loads very slowly. Javascript rid of superfluous graphics and replace everything you can with streamlined CSS instead. You could make a big difference in load time.

It is said that Google uses over 200 different algorithms for judging a site should be classified. What other social behaviors or technical factors do you think have an impact on your site? Share them below in the comments.

2) Does domain age help?

Well before discussing the most controversial topic in the industry I would love to explain you how Google determines the age of website.In fact, there are many ways that you can determine the age of a website. One way those Internet users and many SEO professionals / SEM use is Whois.org. Whois.org user interface provides an easy and very convenient way to find information on a wide range of sites. Web sites can be searched by sites url, keywords and even that no longer exists can be found on occasion, However using a database registry as Whois.org not the best way to Google to determine the age of a website. This is important for those looking to buy a website, especially due to the age of creation. Now and in the past, there are many domains for sale, for example, the early and mid 90's that carry a premium due to its creation date.

Well we all know that the information which whois.org provides us is the information when the Domain got registered but for Google the age of the domain is the value when it crawl a webpage for a specific domain for the first time that information is counted as a domain age for Google. So to calculate the date of creating for a website it is safe to say that Google first refer their own records to determine this information.

Can Domain Age plays an Important role in Ranking?

The answer is No! After all these years, and some experts believe that regardless of age of the domain (usually through anecdotal evidence), Matt Cutts has confirmed that the domain age, no matter when it comes to ranking in the pages of the search engine index. This is really a good news for a lot of companies and SEO / SEM professionals. What matters is the quality and content of the site. While age of a site obviously has an influence on the number of links and indexing the same, that can actually affect their classification, the same age is not a factor according to Matt Cutts.
Matt Cutts goes further to say that usually within a period of 3 months, Google will be able to index your site and from that moment, you are on a level playing field the way Google ranks website. This is great news for companies looking to reach the web to engage their customers and develop their brand. If you are 10 years of age or a few months, your website can climb in the rankings if you follow the best practices of Google. This type of water blows out of the sandbox theory that new sites have to wait a specific period of time before being noticed by Google and ranked among the top of the index pages. It is obvious that Google is very focused on the quality of the site instead of age.

For SEO/SEM Professionals

So if in past you had bought the Domains on the basis of the rank for one of the ranking factors, it is no longer necessary to do so. It is said that there is absolutely no downside to the site being older and may have some natural advantages, as indicated the presence of a long history.

Here is a videos by Matt Cutts discussing this topic.

[Raunaq Rayait]

3)What is rel="canonical" & 301 Redirect?

I had always noticed that majority of person inside the SEO industry are confused about rel=canonical and 301 Redirect. So I had decided to explain rel="canonical" & 301 Redirect and their importance.

The 301 Redirect - When and How to Use it

301 redirect is designed to help users and search engines to find the piece of content that has moved to a new address. Adding 301 redirect means that the content of the page has moved permanently elsewhere.

What it affects to Users.

Users are not aware that URL redirects to a new location unless the change in the URL in your browser. Even if they make the point that, if the content is still what they were originally looking for, is unlikely to be affected. So in terms of keeping visitors happy, 301 redirects are fine if you are redirecting them to the proper page they are looking for.

What it affects to Search Engine.

Theories says that if a search engine finds a 301 redirect on a URL than it will follow the new targeted URL and stop recognizing the old URL’s. Search Engines also passes the exiting link juice to the new URL, Well it is not sure that they will pass 100% of link juice or the anchor text. Once Google had announced that 301 can pass anchor text, but they don't guarantee it.

Search Engines also remove the old page from their index so they can provide more and more relevant and quality information to their users. This will take time but no longer than few weeks I had also witness some of my client pages deindexed very fast as expected.

Problems with redirections.

1) Not knowing your 301s from your 302s

The most common problem I have come across is that many developers mistaken their 301 redirects by using 302.The difference between 301 and 302 is that 302 is a redirection which is used the content is temporarily moved to somewhere else and you know that 301 used for permanent redirection. So the link juice and anchor text is unlikely to be passed across from 302 redirect, Results the new page(URL) witness the hard time in term of search engine ranking.

2) Redirecting all pages in one go to a single URL

Another common mistake I see is the migration of the site. An example is if your site has 100 pages that are moved elsewhere. You really should put 301 redirects in these 100 pages that point to the most relevant page on the new site. However, I often see people redirect all the 100 pages to a single URL, usually the home page. Although the intention can not be manipulated, there have been cases of people doing this to try to consolidate all the links from a lot of pages on one page, to make it stronger. This can sometimes force Google to take a closer look of the event and if it happens than believe me your site is in the deep hell of Google spam list.

Matt Cutts talks about this in this Webmaster Tools video:



When you should use a 301

Moving Sites

You should not stop using 301 redirects if you are moving your website to a new location or change the URL of a new structure. In this situation, you do not want users or search engines to see the old site, especially if the change is happening because of a new design or structural changes. Google provide clear guidelines here on this and recommend the use of 301s in this situation.

Expired Content

You should only use a 301 if your content have expired on website, as the old terms and conditions, older products or news that are no longer relevant and of no use to its users. There are some things to keep in mind though when removing the old content of your website -

*Check out your analytics and check out, Is the content on the old page are getting any search traffic or not? If yes than, Is it fine with you to loose that traffic?
*Is their any other page which have similar content that you can use to send visitor to? If yes than the take a advantage of using 301 redirect the traffic instead of losing it.
*May the content is useful for future? For example if you have a ecommerce site and have a page with a products which you are not selling or not interested to sell. Is you have any future plans with those products? If yes, than use a redirection instead of deleting that page.

Multiple Versions of the Homepage

This is another common mistake I had seen many times. Potentially a homepage URL can be accessed through the following methods, depending on how it was built -

www.blurbpoint.com
www.blurbpoint.com/home.html
www.blurbpoint.com/index.html

If the homepage can be accessed via these type of URLs, they should 301 to the correct URL which in this case would be www.blurbpoint.com.

Quick warning - the only exception would be if these multiple versions of the page to a single purpose, as shown to users who are connected or cookies have been reduced. In this case, it would be better to use rel = canonical instead of 301.

The Rel=Canonical Tag

Rel= Canonical Tag is relatively new tool for SEOs to use and was first officially announced in February 2009. Amazing it has been a part of SEO from pretty long time but still one of the most misunderstood feature of SEO.

As I mentioned above it is one of the most misunderstood concept of SEO. And many of my clients had some really bad experience while putting tag on all their pages pointing to their homepage and unfortunately Google aggressively notice the canonical tag and flush all the pages out of its ranking. The most interesting and surprising part is that Google says many times that they are having a hard time to trace rel=canonical tags but peoples stories say that Google punished their sites very hardly as they used this tag in a wrong manner. However experience has shown that they take notice of it most of the time - sometimes despite pages not being duplicates which was the whole point of the tag!


When to use Rel=Canonical

Where 301s may not be possible

Unfortunately there are situations where the implementation of 301 redirects can be very difficult, perhaps the site's developers do not know how to use it (I've seen), maybe they just do not like you if you ask them to do this. Technically, a rel = canonical tag is a little easier to implement, since they do need to do anything server side. it's just a case of editing the <head> tag of the page.



Multiple Ways of Navigating to a Page

This is a common problem in large e-commerce web sites. Some of the categories and subcategories may be combined in the URL, for example,

www.Example.com/smartphone/3G
www. Example.com/3G/smartphone

Both of these pages might return the same result set and therefore is a duplicate page. A 301 is not appropriate that you would like to save the URL in the same format as what someone has visited. Therefore, a rel = canonical work well in this situation.

Again, if this situation can be avoided in the first place, then that is the ideal solution instead of using the canonical tag.

When dynamic URLs are generated on the fly
By this I mean that URLs are usually database driven and can vary depending on how the user navigates through the site. The classic example is the session ID each time they are different for each user, so it is not practical to add a 301 to each of these. Another example might be if you add tracking code to the end of the URL path to measure certain URL or clicks on certain links, such as:
www.example.com/widgets/red?source=footer-nav

When Not to Use Rel=Canonical

On New Websites

I've seen some cases where rel = canonical is used in new websites - this is not what the label has been designed. If you are in the fortunate position to help with the structure of a new website have the opportunity to make sure you avoid situations where you could get duplicate content. Make sure you do not happen from the beginning. Therefore, there should be no need for the tag rel = canonical.

Across your entire site to one page

Just a quick comment on this case since this is a way for the rel = canonical tag can hurt you. As I did this as an experiment and killed most of my site. I put the rel = canonical tag through my entire site pointing back to the home page of the website and Google reindexed a large part of my website as a result. The following snapshot from Google Analytics pretty much sums up the effect:



Conclusion

In short, you should be careful when using the 301s or canonical label. Such changes have the potential to go wrong if they do well and can hurt your website. If you are not 100% sure, do some tests on a small set of URLs first and see what happens. If everything seems fine, implement changes gradually in the rest of the site.

As for choosing the best method, it is best to consider what you want for the users and you want to see yet. Then think about search engines and content you want the index and the authority and pass link juice.

[Raunaq Rayait]

What is Duplicate Content

Duplicate is a subject, content, matter is seen on the Internet in more than one place (URL). It is a problem when more than one piece of the same material on the Internet, it is difficult for search engines to determine which version is more relevant to a particular search query. To provide the best search experience, search engines will rarely show multiple, duplicate pieces of material and therefore are forced to choose which version is likely to be the original (or best).

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across any of the fields that exactly match or other content remarkably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples can be harmful to non-duplicate content as follows:

• Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
• Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
• Printer-only versions of web pages

If your site contains multiple pages with identical content to a large extent, and there are a number of ways that can refer to the URL that you prefer for Google. (This is called "canonicalization".)

Well in some cases webmasters deliberately duplicate the content at different domains to manipulate the search engines or to attract more traffic. Deceptive practices like this results poor user experience, where visitors can see substantially repeated on the same results within a set of search results.

Google tried hard to index and show pages with specific information. This filtering means, for example, if your site has a "regular" and "printer" version of each section, and these were not blocked by noindex meta tag, Google will choose one to list. For Google duplicate content is a attempt which is done with the intention to manipulate their rankings and fool their users, Google will also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites. As a result site may be flushed out of the ranking results site looses all its visibility from Google.

There are some steps you should take to save your site to being black listed by Google. Also the following steps may also help your site to regain search engine ranking.

SEO Best Practice

1)301 Redirect

The best way to resolve the duplicate content issue is to set 301 redirect from duplicate page to the original one. As I said above Google will never show the multiple result of the same domains so if you think that your multiple pages have a potential to rank than 301 redirect is the best option to combine them into dingle page, the best advantage of doing this is that they will no longer compete each other, but will establish a stronger relevancy and popularity signals. This helps your site to gain Google and other search engine trust and results a boost in search engine ranking.

2) Rel="canonical"

If you have multiple pages with duplicate content, you can tell search engine which page you want to get searched by Search engines. This is called “canonicalization”. If search engine agrees that your referred canonical page is the best and original one it will show that preferred page in its result.
You have to add a bit code into the head section of the similar (non-canonical) pages. To tell search engines your referred choice.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/filename.html"/>

Naturally, you should replace the example.com/filename.html with your actual domain name and file name.

3) Be consistent:
Try to keep your internal linking consistent. For example, don't link to

http://www example com/page/
http://www example com/page
http://www example com/page/index.htm.

4) Use most appropriate domains.(Top level Domains)

If you are targeting the site for specific location than I personally recommend you to use top level domain. As once Google had announced that domains with country prefix would more likely to rank fast as compare to .com when targeting specific region.

Google thinks http://www example.co.uk contains more UK-focused content, as compare to
than http://www example com/uk or http://uk example com.

5) Associate carefully:

If you Associate your content on other sites, Search engines will always show the result which they think is most perfect one for their users for specific search, some times search engines will not show the result which you are expecting. So it would be more good for you that all the sites associated with you and your content should have a link back to original article. And if anybody is using your content than you can also ask them to use noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing a duplicate version of the content.

6) Use Webmaster Tool to set various URL parameters.

You can tell Google how you want them to index your site as Google webmaster Tools allow us to choose the preferred domains for our site and allow setting for various URL parameters.

(for example, http://www example com or http://example com)

The only disadvantage is just that this technique will only work for Google changing in the setting of webmaster tools will not affects anything in bing, yahoo and other search engines. Actually it is a draw back of other search engines.

7) Avoid making similar content.

If your site or blog have many pages that contain similar content than I must say you should consolidate those pages into one. For example if you have a travel site which separates cities with different pages and contains similar content to interact with users, In that case you should change the content of the pages or merge them into the single page. This will help search engines to give more accurate results of your site.

Note:

Google never recommends blocking crawler access to duplicate content for any website. Google suggests that making a fresh and more unique content is much more helpful and smart option instead of blocking a duplicate pages. And if making a new content is not possible than Google suggests us to use the rel="canonical" link element, the URL parameter handling tool, or 301 redirects. Google also tell users to adjust the crawl rate setting in webmaster tools if the duplicate content of your site invites Google to crawl your website again and again.

Duplicate Content on a site is not the reason to follow the above steps the above steps should be followed if you want Google and other search engines show your desired or expected results of your website. If your site contains Duplicate content and you are not doing any thing about it than it would harm your website as search engines will keep working to do their best for choosing more and more appropriate results for their users and it is possible that your site will loose all the visibility from search engines.

[Raunaq Rayait]

What is a doorway page/cloaking?

Sometimes webmasters use to say to submit “bridge” pages or “doorway” pages to search engines for the purpose to improve traffic on their sites. Doorway pages are created to improve a site performance for particular keywords. They are also known as portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages, and by other names as well.

It is very easy to identify doorway pages as they are only designed for search engines, Yes doorway pages are developed only for search engines not for human beings. Here I am going to explain you how to make these pages and some of the problems we usually face while creating Doorway pages or attempting cloaking

.Note: Cloaking and Doorway are two part of same coin. And these are black hat techniques which are consider as a spam by all the search engines. Using such techniques can risk your site. So as part of the genuine link building company I would recommend you not to use such techniques in your marketing campaign.

I am are writing on this subject is just because some form of the techniques are proven as ethical white hat techniques now days.

What is Doorway page?

If a user clicks on the search results some times they will redirect to another pages with some irrelevant information this kind of events are happen due to doorway pages. In most cases user may redirected by a fast meta refresh command to another page well other kind of redirections are also used such as Javascript and server side redirection, .htaccess file, server configuration file. Doorway pages are also created as a dynamic pages generated by scripting languages such as PHP.

Door pages are often easy to identify which are designed mainly for search engines, not humans. Sometimes an entry page is copied from another high ranking page, but this can cause the search engine to detect the page as a duplicate and exclude it from the lists of search engines.

As all the search engines give penalty for using the META refresh command, So java script for redirection are the most popular and successful trick to get user users to the desired destination page.

But the most improved version of doorway pages are Content Rich Doorways these pages are very sophisticatedly designed to gain high traffic without the use of redirection. In fact Content Rich Doorway pages are one of the most ethical white hat SEO techniques and now days we all know it as a Content Marketing. Content Rich Doorways are now designed for visitors not for search engines where visitors are offered to follow standard links.

Now literature in the doorway page encourages visitors to visit a targeted page. Developing a different Content rich page is in fashion to get more conversion rate from PPC campaigns to boost ROI’s.

Here are the ways to deliver a Doorway pages.

1) Low Tech Delivery

There are different ways to provide doorway pages. Low-tech way is to create and render the page targeted towards specific Keywords. Some peoples use it very aggressively and use this technique for each page and for all search engines.

One problem with this is that these pages tend to be very general. It is easy for people to copy them, and make minor changes, and provide a revised page of their own, hoping to emulate the success of any. Also, you may be similar to the pages to each other and that are considered duplicates and excluded automatically by the search engine lists, and session.

Low Tech Delivery has other problems that the users are not always redirected to relevant page. Users complain that they were searching for a polo clubs and redirected to the some other sites or to some login page means the users are not able to reach a targeted page. So to land those at proper landing page webmaster use some thing like “Click Here” links or fast Meta refresh commands.

Well “Click Here” links or any other techniques which are used between targeted page or entry page are called as “bride pages” and “jump pages”. As those pages either “bridge” or “jump” the visitors across the gap.

Search engines no longer support pages with redirection goal, to control the abuse of doorway pages. So webmaster usually swap a real page with a door way page once the position achieved. This is the "code swapping", which is also sometimes done to prevent others from learning exactly how the page ranked well. Also called "bait-and-switch". The disadvantage is that a search engine can review it at any time, and if search engine successfully index the real page the position can be lost.

Another note here: just take the meta tags of the page ("meta-baiting"), does not guarantee access to the page you will do well. In fact, sometimes re-render the page exactly from another site does not gain the same page. There original position is a different reason for why this is happening which is beyond this article, but the main point is to understand that you do not necessarily find any "secrets" by displaying the source code, you do not necessarily give any away.

2)Agent Delivery

The next step is to provide a different page only for search engines. Each search engine reports an "agent" name, just as each browser reports a name.

Feature to provide the name of the agent is that you can send the search engine on a custom page after redirect users to the actual content, which wants them to see. This eliminates the entire "bridge" the problem completely. It also has the additional advantage of code "cloaking".

Well, not quite. People can Telnet to your web server, and report the name of the agent as a particular search engine. And then see exactly what you delivered. In addition, it may be some search engines do not always report the exact same name as the agent, and specifically to help keep people honest.

What is Cloaking?

Cloaking is SEO technique in which the content is differently created for search engine robots compare to original one which is presented to the user’s browsers. Cloaking do this by releasing a different content based on IP addresses or User-Agent HTTP header of the requesting user. In more details suppose a user is identified as search engine spider than the script at server will show a different version of content which we had designed for search engines, this is not the actual content of the web page. Some times content on the webpage is used to present in such a manner that a search engines cannot read it. The main propose of cloaking is to cheat search engine for ranking with an inappropriate content. That’s because search engine consider this techniques as a SPAM or Black Hat SEO.However, it can also be functional (how antiquated) technique for search engine information on subjects they would not be able to find another way because it is embedded in non-textual containers such as video or certain components like Adobe Flash Player.
Cloaking is essentially a technique to get a better ranking in search engines. Use of Cloaking on the website actually is a attempt to cheat search engines and therefore anyone who comes to your site from search engines.

Cloaking is also frowned upon by most search engines. Google and other search engine remove any site if violating rules from their result pages entirely and sometimes the black list (so that other engines do not list it). This means that while you can enjoy the highest rank for a while, ultimately, you will be caught and lose all your rankings altogether.

Finally, the cloaking does not work. As search engines are getting very smart and the content on the page is becoming a major factor of ranking. Means search engines are no longer follow the codes or tags in your source page.

[Raunaq Rayait]

What are meta tags?

Meta tags are information that is placed between the head tag of the source code of your website. These meta tags first tell the search engines and other user on the content of your website (description), keywords, format, title, and if you want search engines to track (and index) the page.

There are some labels that are displayed to the user, such as the title tag (which is the title that appears at the top of your browser).

Note that the big search engines no longer have these labels into account when ranking your web pages (with the exception of the title tags). Some search engines smaller and more specialized still use the keywords and description tags when sorting and viewing your site.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

<html>

<head>

<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Author: A.N. Author, Illustrator: P. Picture, Category: Books, Price: £9.24, Length: 784 pages">

<META http-equiv="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

<META NAME="google-site-verification" CONTENT="+nxGUDJ4QpAZ5l9Bsjdi102tLVC21AIh5d1Nl2390 8vVuFHs34="/>

<title>Example Books - high-quality used books for children</title>

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow">

Google understands the following meta tags (and related items):

<meta name="description" content="A description of the page" />

This tag provides a brief description of the page. In some cases this description is used as part of the fragment is shown in search results.

<title>The Title of the Page</title>

Although technically not a meta tag, this tag is often used in conjunction with the "description". The content of this tag are shown as the title in the search results (and of course in the user's browser).

<meta name="robots" content="..., ..." />
<meta name="googlebot" content="..., ..." />

These Meta tags can control the behavior of search engine for crawling and indexing. The robots meta tag applies to all search engines, while the "Googlebot" meta tag is specific to Google. The default values are "index, follow" (the same as "all") and do not need to be determined. Google aware of the following values and whenever you want to use the multiple functions or value, seprate them with a comma:

noindex: prevents the page from being indexed
nofollow: prevents the Googlebot from following links from this page
nosnippet: prevents a snippet from being shown in the search results
noodp: prevents the alternative description from the ODP/DMOZ from being used
noarchive: prevents Google from showing the Cached link for a page.
unavailable_after:[date]: lets you specify the exact time and date you want to stop crawling and indexing of this page
noimageindex: lets you specify that you do not want your page to appear as the referring page for an image that appears in Google search results.

*Google allows us to use all these tags in the header of your pages by using "X-Robots-Tag" HTTP header directive. This is very useful for you to tell search engines which pages or information you don't want to get indexed.

<meta name="google" content="notranslate" />

When Google recognize content of website is not in the language that user understands than Google provides the translate links in the search result. Well this is a feature of Google and other search engines which helps our content readable and useable to larger group of users. But some times you may don’t want that your content get translate to any other language so by using this Meta Tag you can tell Google not to translate your page.

<meta name="google-site-verification" content="..." />

This Meta Tag is used to verify your ownership for Webmaster Tools.
*Note: The value of the "name" and "content" attributes must match exactly what is provided to you (including upper and lower case)

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="...; charset=..." />

This tag defines the type of goal contents page and character set. Be sure to include the content attribute value quotes - otherwise the charset attribute may be interpreted incorrectly.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="...;url=..." />

This Meta tag are used as a form of redirection as this tag sends users to the new URL’s after a certain amount of time. Well this tag is not supported by all the browsers and this is the main reason that this Tag not gains much popularity as 301 or 302 redirect.

Other points to note:

Google can read both HTML and XHTML-style meta tags, regardless of the code used on the page.
This is not an exclusive list of available metadata tags, and you should feel free to use the meta tags, if they are important to your site. Just remember that Google ignores meta tags which they doesn't know.