Thursday, March 02, 2006
Questionable Search Engine Tactic Two: Redirection
Tactic: Redirection; Level: Moderately evil – You may have seen this one in the news if you follow geeky tech news like I do. BMW Europe’s entire web site was banned from Google’s search engine for engaging in this tactic. What is redirection? It’s actually a combination of a non-evil tactic and evil one. Let me explain.
First, it’s a common and more or less accepted tactic to put lots and lots of very specific text, repeatedly but not in a repetitive pattern, on your web pages in order to increase the perceived quality of your page. This makes for some very odd looking pages, and it’s why you’ll often see pages that sell something very simple appear to say way more than they need to about the product. The more times those keywords are mentioned in a page in the context of normal writing – that is, not just mindlessly repeated all over the page, but actually used in intelligible ways – the more likely that page will be found for those keywords.
This is what’s called keyword “quality” – it means that you are actually talking about the keywords on your page, rather than just listing them to elevate your search rankings. Listing tons of words is another old school tactic and search engines get around this by looking for quality. The problem with creating this kind of quality for a commercial site is that it can create (as I mentioned before) some odd looking pages, especially if you are trying to sell a high-dollar, exclusive product like a luxury car.
The redirection trick works like this: A web site operator (in this case, BMW Europe) sets up one of these pages loaded with quality keywords (BMW, car, luxury, etc., all in quality sentences or context) to pull a higher ranking in the search listing. The unwitting Google user clicks on that link and is magically taken to BMW Europe’s homepage, which happens to have very little wording on it – just lots of pictures and other stuff you’d expect on a normal auto manufacturer site. The trick here is that the user is actually taken to the keyword-loaded page and then redirected to BMW’s homepage without ever noticing that they actually went through this hidden “gateway.” Since this is against Google’s terms of service, BMW Europe got banned from Google’s listings until they changed their pages.
First, it’s a common and more or less accepted tactic to put lots and lots of very specific text, repeatedly but not in a repetitive pattern, on your web pages in order to increase the perceived quality of your page. This makes for some very odd looking pages, and it’s why you’ll often see pages that sell something very simple appear to say way more than they need to about the product. The more times those keywords are mentioned in a page in the context of normal writing – that is, not just mindlessly repeated all over the page, but actually used in intelligible ways – the more likely that page will be found for those keywords.
This is what’s called keyword “quality” – it means that you are actually talking about the keywords on your page, rather than just listing them to elevate your search rankings. Listing tons of words is another old school tactic and search engines get around this by looking for quality. The problem with creating this kind of quality for a commercial site is that it can create (as I mentioned before) some odd looking pages, especially if you are trying to sell a high-dollar, exclusive product like a luxury car.
The redirection trick works like this: A web site operator (in this case, BMW Europe) sets up one of these pages loaded with quality keywords (BMW, car, luxury, etc., all in quality sentences or context) to pull a higher ranking in the search listing. The unwitting Google user clicks on that link and is magically taken to BMW Europe’s homepage, which happens to have very little wording on it – just lots of pictures and other stuff you’d expect on a normal auto manufacturer site. The trick here is that the user is actually taken to the keyword-loaded page and then redirected to BMW’s homepage without ever noticing that they actually went through this hidden “gateway.” Since this is against Google’s terms of service, BMW Europe got banned from Google’s listings until they changed their pages.
# posted by Unknown @ 12:31 PM 
