Despite the ugliness of the "gray" methods of website promotion, they continue to be widely used by many webmasters. They play the role of non-long-term strategic measures aimed at achieving a quick result necessary for further promotion.

An experienced optimizer through the complex use of "white" and "gray" methods can short time achieve a better result than when using white methods alone. It should be noted that the inept use of “gray” promotion methods can lead to various kinds of trouble.

Search engine filters are constantly being improved, which will eventually lead to a drop in the rating of a web resource, and in especially difficult cases, to exclusion from the search results. Thus, such a responsible task as website promotion should be entrusted only to professionals who are able to foresee the consequences of the steps taken.

But there are cases when the border between black and gray methods is erased, the resource is blocked forever or for a certain time.

Gray optimization methods include:

• high;
• buying external links to the site;
• doorway without redirect (no redirection of the user to the site).

Too high keyword density

The relevance of a page is calculated by search robots based on the frequency of a key that is identical to the query. The higher the frequency, the more relevant the resource, respectively. Naturally, the optimizers took this moment into account and began to oversaturate the texts with keys, which made them unreadable.

Along with the change in search engine algorithms, sites containing such content began to lose positions in the search, falling under the filters.

The optimal ratio of keywords in the text, according to most SEOs, is 3-5%. Unfortunately, search bots can't read texts like users do, so SEOs fill content with keywords "to the eyeballs". Thus, they violate the rules, and the site risks falling under the filter.

doorways

Gray doorways are donor sites whose main function is to translate parameters to the recipient site. These sites contain quality content, which actually distinguishes them from black doorways.

Buying links

One of the most common ways gray SEO. The site owner buys links on other sites, trying to increase the PR and TIC of the main site. There are even exchanges that offer similar services. Despite the fact that search engines disapprove of such sites, in most cases, measures to increase resource indicators do not lead to a ban.

Compared to black methods of site promotion, gray optimization is on the verge of the criteria defined by search engines. Therefore, in some cases, search engines may temporarily or even permanently block a site that resorts to such methods. In addition, over time, the queries that are presented to search engines for change in the direction of increasing quality criteria. It turns out that not so long ago it was quite legal, very soon it can become a violation.

Internet Marketing. Complete collection practical tools Virin Fedor Yurievich

"Gray" optimization methods

"Gray" optimization methods

Some optimization methods are "illegal" (from the point of view of search engines), but they allow you to achieve a quick, sometimes immediate effect. These methods are collectively referred to as "spamdexing". When using "gray" optimization methods, the site can be "banned" by the search engine overnight, and then returning it back to the index will be quite a difficult task. In the event that the site is excluded from the index for violations, it is necessary to contact the search engine support service, ask for clarification, possibly make corrections - in general, enter into negotiations.

Most often, such optimization methods are used by random optimization companies whose task is to quickly make money and disappear from the market. Indeed, the results of the company’s work in this case are visible very quickly, almost immediately, and it doesn’t matter that in a few days or weeks these results will turn into dust, and the customer will have to negotiate with search engines for a long time, and then start all optimization work from the beginning .

Not better situation when an employee of the company, having read various forums, having picked up knowledge from blogs of optimizers, begins to optimize the company's website, not imagining the consequences that his actions may have. The problem is aggravated by the fact that the same person will subsequently communicate with the moderator of the search engine to resolve the contradiction. The consequences of such a conversation are unpredictable.

Therefore, it is very useful to understand which optimization methods search engines refer to as "gray" or "black". Remember also that the main tool to combat cheating is competitors, who themselves will tell the moderator of the search engine about the violations found.

So, the "gray" optimization methods include:

1) FILLING - filling the page with keywords and expressions that do not carry a semantic load in the context of the site, most often invisible to the user. I already mentioned this term above. The padding most often looks like small text, consisting of the same word or a small set of words at the bottom of the page. Quite often, when stuffing, the same text color is used as the background color. Search engines catch this trick automatically, but only if it's done with standard HTML tools, not with CSS.

Padding is one of the oldest methods of speed optimization, today it does not bring impressive results, since the weight of the frequency of occurrence in the text of the expression is not as large as it used to be. However, this method is often used because search engines' automatic filters do not always work for it.

The stuffing option is a completely “allowed” way: setting a link to the main product groups on the main and all other pages, as, for example, is done on the site www.pleer.ru. This optimization option increases the relevance of the page. An example of stuffing is shown in fig. 5.13;

Rice. 5.13. Example of padding on a page www.cy-pr.ru/78-nedorogaya_raskrutka.html

2) CLOAKING - demonstration to the search robot indexing the site, and ordinary user different content. In other words, the user sees one site, and the indexer search robot- another. Separation occurs at the level of the user's IP address or by the User Agent: a special script on the server determines the user according to certain criteria and prepares specific page. This method, which bears such a discordant name, is often used by sites not at all to deceive search engines, but to make life easier for users. For example, showing the user a site in the language that he has set as the main language in the browser, or many news sites show users a different set of news depending on the place where the user is currently located.

However, search engines consider this behavior incorrect and sometimes ban such sites, despite the ambiguity of usage. In the same time automatic system no search engine has yet defined cloaking, so all suspicious cases are identified by moderators or, again, competitors. All such cases are dealt with manually, which somewhat reduces the risk automatic shutdown, although the moderator sometimes makes mistakes;

3) DOORWAY - creation a large number separate independent pages optimized for low-frequency queries that redirect visitors to the site being optimized. Thus, it is not the site itself that is being optimized, but pages that have nothing to do with the site and are located on third party hosting under others domain names. This kind of optimization is very noticeable to those who actively use search engines, although its forms can be very bizarre. It automatically redirects to a completely different site blank pages with a single link containing a query entered by users, leading to no one knows where, entire pages with a list of links, sometimes having nothing to do with what you were looking for. Doorways are non-thematic pages designed solely to "forward" the visitor to the desired address.

Recently, doorways are more often used to directly redirect visitors to advertising links. Collecting free clicks on low-frequency queries in search engines, they send users to pages full of ads, such as Runner pages.

Search engines are very tough on doorways, because they really worsen search results, litter it with their countless clones. Today, doorways are created automatically using scripts that can create thousands and hundreds of thousands of pages in a matter of hours, and this problem is very relevant for search engines. To understand the scale of the disaster, it is enough to recall two cases that occurred in 2006. Around the middle of the year issuance of Google was literally overwhelmed with several millions doorways created by one enterprising Belarusian optimizer. Some of the pages he created are still functioning, bringing traffic to someone. And in the early spring of 2006, in an interview, Yandex Editor-in-Chief Elena Kolmanovskaya noticed that the number of doorways that appeared in the search engine index over the past two months exceeded their number in all previous years of work. It was in 2006 that the work of doorway workers increased dramatically, and this situation is depressing even today.

In cases of frequent search queries(those that are asked thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands of times a month) doorways are not visible to the user, they do not rise to the top ten pages of the issue (and even the first hundred). The reason, of course, is the activity of optimizers, who use much more serious methods than those included in doorways. But for low frequency requests where there is little or no optimizer activity, doorways thrive. Here they can be found in almost every issue.

Unfortunately, there is no unambiguous and effective way identifying doorways and removing them from search index. Some obvious options are identified and removed by robots, a number of pages are removed due to user complaints, but technology does not stand still not only with search engines, but also with spammers. So far, the doorways are winning this battle.

The most large-scale doorway grids, combining several million pages that collect traffic in different search engines, create special services selling traffic to interested sites. Today, these are powerful agencies with sufficient funds for the development and development of technologies. An example of a classic doorway can be seen in Fig. 5.14;

4) NEPOTISM - mutual exchange of links in order to increase the citation index ( PageRank) without the meaningful meaning of the references, that is, without thematic necessity. After the start active use mechanisms for determining the relevance (weight) of pages by the volume of its citation at different levels, whole burial grounds of links appeared on sites where mutual links to tens, hundreds, and sometimes thousands of sites were placed. This really increased and increases Page Rank, albeit not by much. IN this case the insignificance of the increase is redeemed by the number of links, that is, the number of these most insignificant increases.

As a result, whole “bunches” of sites intertwined with commercial links appeared on the Internet, and “link exchange” at some point became a very active business, and more than a dozen messages “I propose to exchange links” came to my own long-forgotten site every day. Now the activity has subsided a little, and links are mostly bought, that is, permanent placement of a link on a popular site is acquired, since it is easier, more reliable and better controllable than an exchange.

Search engines struggle with nepotism because, not without reason, they see in it an artificial increase in the “weight” of a site that is not justified by real significance. To date, there is no reliable and adequate system for recognizing the mutual exchange of links between more than three sites that link "in a circle", therefore, the identification of such sites is most often done on the basis of complaints from competitors.

It is important that one of the methods that search engines use to combat nepotism is the reverse citation index, that is, lowering the weight of sites that are linked from such "link dumps" (of course, known search engine). This recent innovation requires a more careful approach to working with links.

Spamdexing is used very often today, and up to a certain point it is, of course, very effective, otherwise it would not be used. However, if the work of the site is planned not for a month, but for years in advance, then spamdexing is not worth using: in the long run, it does not bring a positive result. First of all, I have already noted this, due to the high activity of competitors.