A Guide to Spamdexing - Opening the Door with Doorway Pages
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In much the same way as a magician uses misdirection to achieve his goal, so too do Black Hat SEOers. They do so via what is known as a doorway page. There are various types of these pages, but the main goal is to trick a web searcher into clicking on a link to a site, typically stuffed with false information, and then redirecting them to another.
Doorway pages use a number of methods for the redirects. They might have something as simple as a link pointing to another page, use a meta-refresh tag, or even Javascript/server-side coding to achieve the page swap.
The basic tactic is to create a page that is optimized for say, weddings. When the user clicks the link for the site, a redirect occurs, sending them to a website that is not what they were searching for.
The more advanced types of doorway sites will seek to duplicate a certain page, say Bank of America. These types, known to be content-rich, will not redirect the user, but instead seek to impersonate a given site.
Another version of a doorway page is known as a cloak. Cloaking is a technique that shows one page to a user, and a different page to a search engine, utilizing server-side scripting to detect the IP address and determine if the visitor is a person or a search-bot.
Some Black Hats will argue that cloaking is a way for them to split their website tasks into two parts. The page the bots see is geared specifically for search engines, leaving them to focus more on design and content with regards to the page the humans might see.
Other, less malignant forms of cloaking do exist, such as IP delivery, which allows the user and the search bot to see the same page. Typically this will be used when a site contains content that is not search engine friendly, such as a photographer's graphic-heavy website. It can also be used to target users in specific geographical areas. Amazon is an example of a site that does just such a thing.
Conclusion
Well that concludes the first part of this series. In the next article in this series (which will come along eventually), we will cover other types of spamdexing, such as link spam, word-writable pages, and more.
Till then...
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