Seo Blog | Search Engine Marketing News

Having had a website hacked in the last few weeks and knowing a few other people who had sites hacked this issue has been playing on my mind.

Countless blogs and personal sites are being edited my malicious hackers every day to include hidden links to unscrupulous websites. The aim of adding these hidden links is that the sites they link to will end up ranking highly on the search engines and sometimes it works very well.

The consequences are that often the hacked site gets a penalty or malware warning on Google and sometimes the owner doesn’t ever figure it out.

My worry is that the people doing the hacking are often classed as SEO’s because they are engaged in the practice of moving their websites up the search engines rankings. To me this tactic is nothing to do with SEO in the form that most people practice the strategy but as hacking becomes more widespread the issue is only going to get worse.

Most webmasters are aware that doorway pages are against the guidelines of the major search engines but recently they appear to be making a comeback on the websites of some extremely well known brands.

The definition of a doorway page is provided in the Google Webmaster Guidelines:

Doorway pages are pages specifically made for search engines. Doorway pages contain many links - often several hundred - that are of little to no use to the visitor, and do not contain valuable content. HTML sitemaps are a valuable resource for your visitors, but ensure that these pages of links are easy for your visitors to navigate. If you have a number of links to include, consider organizing them into categories or into multiple pages. But in doing so, ensure that they are intended for visitors to navigate the sections of your site, and not simply for search engines.

Google’s aim is to give our users the most valuable and relevant search results. Therefore, we frown on practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users by directing them to sites other than the ones they selected and that provide content solely for the benefit of search engines. Sites making use of these practices may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in Google search results.

Recently we have come across sites such as propertyfinder.co.uk, reebokstore.co.uk and calendars.com using search engine optimisation methods that we believe amount to doorway page creation. The software they are using crawls the site and creates highly optimised auto generated pages that will rank highly in the search engines.

This method alone is likely to be against the Google guidelines but there is another clever twist to the system. The pages are dynamically cloaked by the referrer keyword so the content the search engines see is different to the content that searchers see when they visit the page from Google. When you visit a page the site will load up content related to whatever you were searching for on Google rather than display the content that it displayed to Google.

Some example queries are below:
Propertyfinder.co.uk
Reebokstore.co.uk
Calendars.com

The above sites appear to be cloaking based on referrer keyword but there are a number of other sites using the auto generated pages system without cloaking. Brands including Thomas Cook, B&Q, Pricerunner, Sony and Sky are some of the larger names listed on the software suppliers website.

It isn’t clear whether Google is turning a blind eye to this but we believe the auto generated pages are being designed purely for search engines rather than users and would therefore be against the guidelines. Sometimes large brands are allowed to break the Google guidelines without getting the same penalties as smaller sites and this might be what’s happening here.

If Google is sanctioning the use of this method then large e-commerce sites could make millions of pounds every year using the system, imagine creating millions of pages that gathered long tail traffic and then listed products depending what the user was searching for.

Global internet information provider comScore has just released research which shows that Google became Canada’s most-visited website for the first time in January, overthrowing the Microsoft destinations which had previously been the most popular.

This is not a terribly surprising development as the search giant has long been one of the most popular websites globally and is the most visited in the UK. In Japan, it is beaten by Yahoo! and closely followed by various Microsoft sites.

As the importance of search engines grows across the worldwide markets, there are more opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to market themselves within an international arena, all they need is visibility.

Recently, Dan Cobley, Google’s director of marketing for UK, Ireland and Benelux, told IT Wales that the internet allows businesses access to customers they could never previously have engaged.

He highlighted: “Even the smallest company operating out of a garage and with a marketing budget of a few pounds a week, can tap into these new opportunities.”

The importance of link building has been rather unusually highlighted by a number of online pressure groups.

An article by Times analyst Drew Broomhall stated that search engines are now a battleground between charities, interest groups and unions, and the corporations or regimes they target.

The reporter noted that when searching Google for Exxon Mobil, the Exxpose Exxon website ranks alongside it, boosted by links from thousands of blogs, forums and environmental pages.

Protest groups even support each other’s causes by reciprocal linking, the article suggested.

This is another interesting example of the power of the web to offer equal coverage to hefty corporations and smaller firms or charities.

Search engine optimisation tactics such as generating inbound links (through white-hat methods, of course!) can place any business on an equal footing with its larger competitors.

Have you ever wondered how some sites get so many links? Clearly sites such as Google deserve to have millions of links but I decided to see which sites and sub pages were building links into the millions.

Check out the results below and see if you can spot the linkbait strategies that have got a site penalised, the automated linkbuilding strategies that work very well and the benefits of creating great plugins and tools.

• 150 million links to http://www.statcounter.com/
• 24.8 million links to http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
• 24 million links to http://wordpress.com
• 22 million links to http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
• 14 million links links to http://www.technorati.com
• 13.7 million links to http://www.moneyexpert.com/Compare-Loans.aspx
• 7.5 million links to  http://www.moneyweb.co.uk/products/mortgages/mcapital.html
• 5.5 million links to http://threestore.three.co.uk/
• 5.5 million links to http://www.microsoft.com/
• 4.8 million links to http://www.apple.com/
• 4 million links links to http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/geovisitors/
• 3 million links links to http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/
• 2 million links to http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress/popularity-contest
• 1.3 million links to http://photomatt.net

There are hundreds of people on forums such as Digital Point giving you the opportunity to have a blog post published across 100 different blogs.

This tactic is clearly not going to be something Google agrees with so if you want to use it then make sure you follow some simple rules.

The first is to make sure you don’t link to your site using obviously unnatural anchor text. Rather than saying “Visit SEOptimise for SEO” you should say something like:

“I was reading an interesting post about xxxxxxxxx on the SEO blog last week and it raised some great points. However I disagree with xxxxxx”

The key is to make the post appear 100% natural and, most importantly, something that you haven’t written.

For those of you unfamiliar with the hissy fit going on over at Digg the past couple weeks, I point you to Tamar Weinberg’s handy recap. In a nut shell, Kevin Rose (Digg founder who really needs to be featured on this site) announced some algorithm changes on Digg, top diggers complained and planned a Digg boycott, Kevin and Jay Adelson (CEO of Digg) crappily addressed user complaints in a chat room, the top diggers were all “omg they acknowledge our existence,” and all was well.

Or not. This new algorithm sucks. Supposedly, the algorithm is supposed to “get a more diverse number of people to Digg the stories on upcoming.” It was also supposed to give new diggers or those of us who don’t have “power accounts” a fighting chance to make it to the home page instead of the almighty, all powerful top diggers who freakin’ dominate all the time. (I direct your attention to virtually any instance where some poor unknown sap gets submission blocked by a power digger who gets the exact same story on the home page because he has a legion of die-hard fans following his every move.)

The algorithm sounds promising, yet it’s supremely lame. What took a digger like Tamar around 100 to 120 diggs to get to the home page (a number that had been steadily climbing the more popular she got) was now taking her well over 200. A less “powerful” but still successful (28% popular ratio) digger submitted a story titled “The 15 Greatest Spaceships of All Time” (clearly a diggworthy topic, if only for the nerdtastic discussion that will inevitably take place in the comments), and after 24 hours it had over 170 diggs and still hadn’t made the home page. The comments made it seem like it wasn’t getting hit with too many buries. Currently the post is dead at around 230 diggs, gathering dust and refusing to tip over to the home page.

Okay, what about unpopular diggers? Us lowly folks who read and comment but have never been successful in getting stories to the home page? Well, let’s take my profile as an example. I’ve been a member of Digg since March 2006. I’m fairly good at leaving snarky comments that get a lot of thumbs on stories, but I’ve only submitted 8 stories to Digg, and none of them have hit popular. My best submission was a whopping 25 diggs. Clearly this algorithm change would benefit an Average Joe like me, right?

I submitted a picture to Digg earlier this week. I took the photo at a Brooks outlet store I went to over the weekend. Brooks is a running gear store, and they were having a big sale (2 for 1s, 50% off, etc). I saw this “deal” for “runderwear” (running underwear), laughed like a fool, and snapped a picture with my phone. I talked to some power diggers I know, and they suggested I submit the image to Digg myself because with the new algo change, I actually had a better chance at making the home page with fewer diggs than they would. I wrote up a decent enough title and description, submitted it to “offbeat sports,” clearly a less popular category, and waited.

It got 72 diggs within 24 hours but didn’t get promoted. I didn’t game Digg for votes (only 8 people on my friends list dugg the story, and I didn’t know most of the other folks), the comments in the thread weren’t of the typical “This is lame, wtf” caliber, and, looking at my submission history, this story did far better than any story I had ever submitted. You’d think that the new algo would be friendly to a story that received over 70 diggs and was submitted by someone who had submitted less than 10 stories in the past two years, right? Guess not.

I don’t know if this algo change is supposed to prevent gaming or what, but it really seems to be punishing both the hardcore Digg lovers who made the site into what it is today (e.g., Tamar and other power diggers) and more casual users like myself who see stories hitting the home page with between 30 and 250 diggs and wonder why their submission didn’t make it. And honestly, isn’t the whole point of having a “Friends” feature on Digg is so that your friends can see what you’re digging and maybe digg the same story? Why would you then punish submitters and say, “Well, actually, you need to have more diverse votes.”

I have a tolerate/hate relationship with Digg that has been veering steadily into the “hate” column. Unlike many other SEOs, I mostly use Digg as an entertainment medium. We don’t have any clients with social media campaigns, and it’s been a while since anything on SEOmoz has gained traction on Digg. I smile when I see Arrested Development references in the comments, roll my eyes when I see Family Guy references, and digg every Wednesday’s Zero Punctuation review. When this entertainment site (I’ll throw some quotation marks around the words news site, since it’s kind of like a legit news site’s dumber but more popular brother) makes a casual user like myself exasperated with things like B.S. algorithms, inexplicable user bans, spammy Shout features, and other changes of the numbskullery variety, I can only imagine how the top diggers and early adopters feel.

A word of advice to Digg (and to anyone with a website, really): don’t piss off your users. They are what make your site what it is today. If we were to do something to alienate our community here, you guys would abandon ship and we’d be a nothing site. It doesn’t matter if you’re an Amazon.com, an SEOmoz, or a simple little knitting forum. Never, ever forget that without your users, your diehard fans, your community members, you are nothing. Listen to your users, roll out features they’re clamoring for, make compromises here and there, politely turn down suggestions, do all of these things. Just acknowledge them. Make them understand that they’re valued and that you owe your site’s success to folks like them.

Can you dig(g) it? I hope so.