There is a lot of sites for Cat Lovers and the competition is tough in this monstermarket. No wonder many siteowners take the easy way to top ranking.

This not about ranking for Cats though. It’s about ranking for Wedding Photographers. And our suspicion is that The CatterySearch is a False with another mission than to help people finding Cats.

If you disable all styles it you will see lots of hidden links on every page of the site. And all hidden links is pointing to wedding photographers like this example:

Why links to wedding photographers only?
Well, it turns out that Denis Zaslavets, the owner of CatterySearch also owns the wedding domains.

Does it work?
We simply don’t know. A few tests shows that the wedding photography domains is poorly optimized and none of the keyword phrases we have tested is found on the SERP first page.

Our conclusion is of course that this is SEO Spam and that proper SEO in this case probably would give the wedding photography sites a boost in the SERP’s. The technique used in this case is probably useless.

If you have other observations on this please make a comment

Not all exclusions happen because you are a (deliberate) spammer, as this video will show you.

Shari goes on to show us some of the characteristics of doorway pages. Read the whole article if you want all details. Here I’ll extract what is of interest in the cases we have written about here on this blog. In the case about the Norwegian SEO our view was fully shared by the Google Webspam Team, with the exclusion of the SEO firm from Google as a consequence.

So, what is a doorway page? What are the doorway page characteristics? This is how Shari Thurow puts it:

“Doorway pages come in all shapes and sizes. Some are very easy to spot. They’re often computer-generated, text-only pages of gibberish. If human visitors viewed the page, they wouldn’t purchase from the company. The page is ugly and nonsensical.

Yet some doorway pages are very, very attractive and difficult to spot. They’re designed to visually blend in to a Web site. They have graphic images and navigation schemes. The content contains complete sentences, paragraphs, even reasonable calls to action (CTA). Spam doorway pages aren’t necessarily computer-generated. Staff at SEM firms can and do write doorway page content.”

Doorway pages can take many forms. The basics is that they are made to manipulate the search results. This is something neither we (the users), nor the search engines will accept. If you can’t compete following the ethical guidelines and the abundance of good (often) free SEO advices available, you should spend your money on AdWords and other marketing activities.

Shari Thurow asks everyone to be on the alert for artificial links. She writes: “Listen for any phrase that resembles “instant link popularity.” Even if you don’t change your site, unethical SEM firms may build hundreds, even thousands, of doorway pages that point to your site to artificially boost link popularity.”

Artificial linking is never a good thing. But when is a link artificial? Let’s turn it upside down and ask: What is a natural link? Natural links are unpaid “votes” from one web page to another. A link from you to your partners is of course legitimate. Also links to related pages, links to pages you would like your users to visit (like my link to Shari’s article), links to other sites you may have, links to customers etc. But when a coffe shop in Bangkok is linking to a dentist in Oslo, and a lawyer in Stockholm is linking to a shop selling dildos and whips, something fishy is obviously going on. (None of these examples have any relevance to our latest analysis.)

So what does Shari Thurow offer instead of doorway pages? The same as every decent SEO would do: search engine friendly information pages meant for users and with an “invitation” to visit them in the form of menu elements or links with meaningful anchor text. Let’s say you sell car stereo systems. It would be considered a good thing from a search engine point of view (because it would be relevant and interesting for the users) to make information pages (or in Scandinavia we would call them “temasider“) about the different car stereo brands, the different models etc. Or how about making the ultimate car stereo history page, showing old car stereos? This might also be a good link baiting strategy, gathering natural links from enthusiasts and maybe even museums with high PageRank (if the page is good, of course).

Shari Thurow says that “the primary goal of an information page is to provide useful information to your target audience. Examples of information pages include tips, set-up instructions, FAQs, and glossaries. […]Information pages reside on your Web server and are a natural part of your W site. In fact, links to information pages tend to be in the main navigation scheme.”

The navigation is a key issue when we talk about doorway pages. If your pages are meant for users, they will be integrated in the navigational structure in some way or another, but not necesserely available from the homepage. If you want customers to find a page, you lead him to it. You don’t hide the links from the users in a sitemap link or a sitemap symbol. The sitemap links and symbols Aleksika and Prioritet used, led to doorway sitemaps, not sitemaps as Google and usability guys recommend.

Shari Thurow actually addresses the doorway sitemap issue in her article. She calls the Aleksika/Prioritet type of sitemap for “hallway pages”: “A hallway page is created specifically to link to doorway pages. A hallway page sounds like a modified site map, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, a hallway page is exactly that – a modified site map that links to doorway pages.”

Read Shari Thurow’s article: How to Spot Search Engine Spam: Doorway Pages

The problem with Doorway pages is not the pages themselves, or the content. But the fact that they are only accessible through a search engine search or links that is almost invisible for the ordinary user. This leads Google to the conclusion that users that visits the website by a link to the homepage sees fewer pages than Googles spider does. The hidden pages is made for showing up with high ranking in the search engines result pages and has only one-way links to the homepage or the websites ordinary pages.

What Google (and the other search engines) want is that all pages (or information) is equally visible both for the ordinary user and for the search engines spiders.

So our simple advice is to make the Doorway pages visible from the home page. Either through the main menu or trough a visible link with a meaningful anchor text. (Why not call them info-pages if that is what they are).

Visibility is not always easy to define. These two examples below is visibility defined as “hidden” by Google. And these solutions caused penalty from Google.

The first one is the old Bolia case where the links was hidden behind the grey vertical text on the right side. In the second example the links was hidden behind the tree-structure (sitemap) symbol in the bottom left area:

Not one of the link farms we have checked, have robots.txt requesting a nofollow or noindex to the search engines. So when a link farm is not indexed, it is excluded by Google because it violates the guidelines and – indeed – have no value for users. Google does not want these link farms in their index.

The main point with these link farms is that they are used to lead search engines to doorway pages otherwise not accessible to users.

The link farmes have inherited PageRank from their previous owners, as the print screens show.

The link farms appear to be banned from Google recently since thay haven’t lost their PageRank, but since Google seldom talks about the sites they ban, we may never know if this has happened as a result of the report or if they have targeted Aleksika’s link farms some other way at an earlier stage. The interesting thing is that they are not in the Google index. And Aleksika have not shut Google out with a robots.txt – that we have checked.

See for yourself:

This means that the domain still has a PageRank (which normally indicates that it is indexed by Google). It also means that there are site(s) linking to the domain. At the same time the domain is not indexed by Google, which is a sign that the domain is banned.

A report on the Danish SEO company Aleksika is now available. SEO Spam Cops have analyzed Aleksika’s extensive use of doorway pages and link farms to manipulate SERPs.

Aleksika is in our opinion clearly violating the ethical guidelines in order to boost rankings for their customers.

In our report we list a selection of the link farms and give in-depth analysis of the doorway pages on selected sites.

Download (2 reports)

• SEO company Aleksika’s use of doorway pages on clients’ sites – and their use of link farms to boost ranking in SERPs (PDF)
• Appendix: A selection of doorway pages that get inbound links from SEO company Aleksika’s link farms (PDF)

The Main report is 2,05MB and the Appendix is 235K.

If you experience problems with downloading try:
the SEOforum download archive 

A new report from SEO Spam Cops is now released. It shows how the site Mestergronn.no uses doorway pages and how the SEO company behind them, Aleksika, uses link generating spam sites (a kind of link farms) to boost the ranking by making numerous links directly to the doorway pages.

Update 7.february: Mestergronn.no removed all the Doorway pages immediatly after the release of the report and says that they did not know this technique was violating the SEO guidelines.  We thank Mestergrønn.no for quick response.

Download the report “The use of doorway pages on www.mestergronn.no” here

On www.interdekk.no the menu is changed to “seo sider” as you can see in the updated list below. This is not done by Prioritet.no but by AdNow.dk which claims that the menu “seo sider” with the underlying Doorwaypages on the domain “http://interdekk.adnow.dk/interdekk/” is following the Google Guidelines. Well, it is not but Interdekk seems to believe AdNow and until then Prioritet will not implement their new seo solution for Interdekk.no.

Here is the list per Des 19th 2007:

Status per Des. 17:

regards
SEO Spam Cops

Gunnar Bråthen,
Roar Eriksen and Per-Erik Skramstad