Affiliate Marketing Blog: Who Said Doorways & Hidden Link Spam Are Dead?

Thursday, 19 April 2007

Who Said Doorways & Hidden Link Spam Are Dead?

Looking around and some SERPS for a client I noticed that Doorway pages are alive and kicking and living in a corner of the Googleplex.

If you do a search for Aerospace recruitment agencies, you'll see three sites that use doorways:

It shocked me that Google still hasn't managed to kick these sites out. The worst culprit is TipTopJob which I've known about for years as I used to do supply SEO consultancy services to the market leaders - but I'm still suprised that the tactics I adviced my clients not to continue with a good 3 years ago are still being used to success today.

The only reason I can see that they've not been kicked out to date is that they've built up some "trust" with Google and they're cutting them some more slack.

I remember having a site using the same sort of format about 3 years ago and it lost 95% of it's Google traffic over night whent they really started to clamp down on duplication. To my mind they've been ratcheting up their duplication onslaught ever since, but some still they're letting some sites through.

Another thing that has peed me off recently is that despite Matt Cutts posting a year ago about a hotel site in Bath, UK that had a shed load of links "hidden" with css to be 1px high. What makes me chuckle is that they've not even tried to hide the formatting in an external css file, it's in the page and even called it "tinytext":

.tinytext { font-size: 1px; color: #FFFFCC; text-decoration: none; line-height: 1px;}

come on Matt, how blatent does it have to be before it's removed from the index?

The site for those that want to know is Villa Magdala.

Villa Magdala Hidden Text
This is the code that they use to hide the links is below:

<div class="tinytext"> <a href="contents.html" class="tinytext">Contents Page</a> <a href="description.html" class="tinytext">The Villa Magdala - A Description</a> <a href="links.html" class="tinytext">Website Links</a> <a href="2000years.html" class="tinytext">'Two Thousand Years of History'</a> <a href="directions.html" class="tinytext">Maps, Directions & Travel</a> <a href="history.html" class="tinytext">History of the Villa Magdala</a> <a href="ideal.html" class="tinytext">'Bath - the Ideal Base'</a> <a href="accolades.html" class="tinytext">Accolades & Awards</a> <a href="contact.html" class="tinytext">Contact Us</a> <a href="roomrates.html" class="tinytext">Room Rates & Tariffs</a> <a href="info.html" class="tinytext">Useful Information</a> <a href="http://store.ohtee.com/" class="tinytext">Anti-Virus & NOD32 online store</a> We are located in Bath in the UK overlooking peaceful Henrietta Park and just minutes level stroll from the historic city centre, offering lovely, top quality hotel (aka guesthouse or bed and breakfast) 5 (five!) Diamond accommodation for a vacation, holiday, business or break in England, UK. Keywords describing our accommodation include room, bath, bed, guesthouse, break, breakfast, Britain (and Victorian Britain, and bed). Located in a classic Georgian street, with Georgian and Victorian architecture abundant - stay in a five Diamond guesthouse in England for your vacation. Vacation in a Georgian guesthouse or Roman guesthouse, Villa Magdala hotel, peaceful, bed - and UK accommodation in bath - experience the shopping, park, tourist attractions, vacation, villa, accommodation! For business, or as a tourist on holiday or coming to travel in England in Britain; whether to travel, or on a family (family) holiday with the family or on business in Britain, we would love to welcome you to the Villa Magdala, beautiful Victorian accommodation close to the centre of Roman Bath. </div>

There's me having a site removed because I duplicated the league tables for the EURO 2008 qualifying rounds for my users to see - I made the mistake of putting them on every page of the site, I've also made the mistake in the past of labeling my blog posts - but there's sites actively trying to "game" Google and they get away with it!

A GET VISIBLE web site designed by

4 Comments:

At 19 April 2007 at 23:55 , Dio Bach said...: I'm a bit concerned reading what you say about the footie results on every page. I was wondering if maybe I'm creating problems for myself on some of my sites. I tend to run site wide includes that link to the last 10 news headlines and the last 5 forum posts on every page of the site.

I just spotted I got lots of pages in the supplemental, and reading what you pointed out there about the football results, I'm wondering if maybe that's partly why. The content is all original otherwise. Maybe I'll have to try taking them off for a while, see if it helps.
At 20 April 2007 at 07:56 , getvisible said...: Hi mate

I'll have a dig around in a bit. But I do recall them mentioning about suggesting that we should reduce the amount of stuff in "boiler plates". I can't remember if that was from Matt Cutt's blog or elsewhere?

The seo game is now about cross page duplication :-(

Lee
At 20 April 2007 at 08:22 , getvisible said...: Back at my PC Now.

I've found the post I was refering to. It's by Adam Lesnik - Matt's Co-worker.

He mentioned on the Offical Google Webmaster Blog that:

"Minimize boilerplate repetition: For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details."

For me, it's a bit more than "boilerplate repition", it's turned into avoiding "navigation repition" and "useful information" repition.

Dio - instead of removing the latest 10 news headlines and 5 forum posts ... is there away to make them unique? Perhaps looking at drawing information from your url and searching your content and pulling in relevant information?

This would just be like people used to (still do) add Miva search results to bring in relevant information and break any duplication problems???

Worth a try?

Lee
At 20 April 2007 at 11:04 , Dio Bach said...: Hey Lee, cheers. I actually remember skimming 'Mini Matt's' post when it came out, but not really paying too much attention (I follow SEO, but I'm not really one.)

Given that many of my sites (all unique hand-written content) have tanked recently, I obviously need to revisit it. I think it could be a large piece of why.

The unique stuff is maybe beyond me, but I think I can cut down the boilerplate stuff. Will have to work on it over the next day or two. Thanks for taking the time and for giving me the impetus to do so. :)