Domain Cloaking, Duplicate Content And Hidden Pages

Usually most of the problems are easy to overcome when designing your site. But some can be quite bothersome. Let’s mention so called Black Hat Techniques, a taboo SEO technique. Many spammers are using these techniques. Black Hat Techniques are used with only one goal – increasing your rankings in search engines. So my suggestion is to stay away from them if you want to have your site online for indefinite time.

Domain cloaking is one of Black Hat Techniques. The goal of domain cloaking is to show users different content than search engines. So page that has been built for search engines has small or no value to users and vice versa.

In other words, it’s a bad trick with goal getting into high SERPS. Usually it starts with content cloaking, that is done by using the code on the site that can detect who is coming to the site – visitor or search engine crawler.

When the crawler visits the site, it is re-directed to another SEO optimized website. The problem with this technique is that many of the search engines have filters to detect such tricks and immediately the site is banned and excluded from search index. So Black Hat Sites are usually online for few months or even few days. Sooner or later they will be discovered by Google or other SE.

SO the point of spammers is to be prepared that ban might happen but in that time they want to get as much traffic as possible and redirect it to another site where they can convert, sell products etc.

Duplicate content

Unique interesting content can be one of the most challenging parts of the new site. Writing several hundreds pages with unique interesting content is not that easy. Many people hire people to write for them. These people are so called content writers. Others scrape content from other sites.

Nowadays it is very easy to get free content on several internet sites. You don’t even have to pay for it. But the problem is that this content is not unique and many other people might be using the same content on their sites.

And the results is that one article might appear on few hundreds sites. And all these sites can not rank for the same keywords in that article.So many search engines are programmed in special way and have so called duplicate filter that can detect duplicate content on your site. They can see how fresh that content is and if it is copied from other sites.

This way you will get lower rankings in SERPs. Your site might not appear in results often.

Highly distributed articles. These articles can be found on several sites that have similar theme. Articles like that are usually written by professional writers that want to get attention for their project or passion. But as you can see these articles are widely spread and almost the same on several sites. So they are considered duplicate. Having them on your site will result in lower rankings.

Product descriptions for e-commerce stores. E-commerce stores have several hundreds or even thousands pages with product descriptions that can be only 1 paragraph long. There could be thousands such descriptions on one site. Search engine crawlers are programmed to skip over most product descriptions. In other case a crawler might never be able to index the whole site.

Duplicate web pages. It happens sometimes and it is not a good feeling I am telling you. Other spammers just simply copy the content of your pages and you can find their in SERPS because of your content. These duplicate pages on other sites prevent your site to rank as they should. It might happen that duplicate pages of a spammer might rank instead of yours.

Scraped content. Content scraping is when somebody is pulling content from other web sites and repackaging it so that it looks like he wrote is. Even if it seems to be different than original content, it is still duplicate and search engines can detect that. In fact many search engines will leave you completely out of the search index and the search results.

This is another mistake that you should avoid when building your site with unique and interesting content. Hidden pages are visible only to search engines. They might have hidden keywords, hidden links. Keywords and links help to boost your search rankings, and many people try to include that extra content into site by hiding it from users. It I still visible to crawlers and that is the point.

The way this is done is using the same font color as background, or decreasing the font size to 1px with the help of CSS. The best way is just to avoid this kind of behavior. Otherwise your site might be banned or you will get decreased rankings.

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Maria   |2008-05-27 12:31:48 My site has a lot of duplicate content, now I know it is bad for rankings Reply | Quote

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