Having a Website

    In Chapter 2: Having a Website, you will be given a checklist of what makes website a good one. Learn about the parameters that search engines measure to determine if optimization can be effective for that site. Perhaps you will need to make a few changes with your own site to jive with some of the easy-to-follow suggestions in this section.

 

  • Having a Website
    • Website SEO Quality Parameters
      • Search friendly Domain names
      • Directory Structure, File Naming & Page File Extensions
      • Navigation Menus & Drop Down Menus
      • Robots Exclusion Protocol (Robots.txt File)
      • Error Trapping
      • Google Site Maps & Image Maps
      • Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
      • Server Side Includes (SSI)
      • Graphic-Heavy Pages, Flash & Intro / Splash Pages
    • Search Engine Rules
    • SEO Terminology
    • Dynamic Pages
    • Doorway Pages / Cloaking
    • Frame based sites and Tables
    • Is your website SEO Friendly

Doorway Pages / Cloaking

    Has this ever happened to you? You type in a search query on Yahoo or Google’s search box, and select a relevant-looking link from the results page. When you click on that link, you are greeted with a page that says, “You will be redirected to http://www.someotherpage.com.”

    This kind of landing page is termed as a gateway page or doorway page, and is a perfectly good example of the practice called cloaking. As explained before, there are webmasters who do SEO via unconventional and rather unethical means, by the standards and guideline of search engines.

    Cloaking means that the objective is to lure in the spider to index the site, and not necessarily meant to be targeted for web users or site visitors. There are sources that explain how cloaking makes bots and spiders come to that page by tricking them to believe that it contains stuff that really isn’t there.

    In some ways, they mask or cloak the website, because the visitors see another version of it, and not exactly what the spider had in mind when it was indexed it in the first place. This practice is primarily done to heighten up the rankings in results pages, and is actually a big no-no in SEO.

    In this regard, gateway pages or doorway pages are created to trick spiders and bots into having that site indexed. If you are to start your own website, be sure you never implement this kind of technique.

    If you are considering hiring an SEO firm or SEO consultants to work on your SEO for your site and your business, be sure that this is a type of practice that they do not recommend.

    Remember, your site can be penalized and even banned from search engines this way.