3. Invisible pages and redirects.
As many web developers’ lust to create all-singing and dancing flash
sites has become irrepressible, the quest to find new cunning ways to deceive
the search engines has become ever more prevalent.
Web sites that use splash screens and intro movies programmed in Macromedia
Flash are notoriously hard for the search engines to index, so some developers
have resorted to creating content that is visible to the spiders, but not to the
user.
Ever been to a site and then tried to use the back button only to find it doesn’t
work? Infuriating isn’t it? Well, nine times out of ten the reason for this
will be the site developer attempting to hide content from you and me, the user.
When a spider visits a web site the first thing it looks for (after a file
known as robots.txt) is the main index page for the site. Back in the early 90’s
this would invariably be called index.html, as most sites were written using standard
html code.
Times they are a-changing however. New technologies such as Java, PHP and ASP
are increasingly being used to create a web site’s homepage.
So, if a site uses index.asp as its homepage, the devious web developer will
sometimes choose to create two index pages. The first (the one that the search
engine sees) will be called index.html, and be heavily optimised for all the keywords
and phrases the site owner wishes to promote. The second (the all-singing homepage
the you and I see) will be known as index.asp. All the developer then has to do
is link the first page to the second using a simple redirect.
The result? The search engine will see a page full of promoted keywords and
phrases written in exactly the style it likes to see. Or at least that’s
the theory.
In reality, yes, you guessed, the search engines are onto this in a big way.
Sites are regularly being removed from indexes for exactly this reason. Beware!
Want to see some more? Let’s go…
