Making Google index tag pages - What is the secret?

[at2000]

Hi All,

I've been monitoring many sites in my niche for quite a while and still cannot understand one thing. Some sites with quite many good backlinks can't get even 10% of their websites indexed by Google (because Google doesn't find it worth to be in the index), as a result they have very little Google traffic.

Others, with fewer back links and lower PR, and even not that old (in a few cases only 4 months), have hundreds of thousands of their autogenerated pages with pretty much the same content, and as result huge traffic from big G. Both have next to nothing of unique content.

Site navigation structure is very similar, and it really amazes me what would happen if I had a chance to swap their backlinks.

So, what is the secret? Also, I'm very interested how to achieve this success on my own website, so if you offer this kind of SEO services, please let me know.

Thanks.

[edited by: tedster at 4:25 pm (utc) on May 20, 2010]

[tedster]

What is happening is that someone's spam is getting through the Google filters, at least for now.

How do they do it? Well, it's not our purpose to teach spamming here, but in general, I'd say you're not seeing anywhere near all the backlinks involved -- unless you use a private spidering of the web. Also you're not seeing any 301 redirects and the ranking power they can provide.

Right now Google seems particularly bad at catching this kind of empty, auto-generated page, as several other current threads here have mentioned.

[at2000]

Thanks Ted for your reply.

Yes, may be this can be called spam, but after all, searchers find what they are searching for. And even major sites in my niche employ this approach very successfully, being in Alexa top 1000 list. And it seems that Google adores them. Who knows may be because they bring a lot of revenue from AdSense.

I used a tool that shows all followed links including 301-ed. Surely it doesn't show all the links, but I compared profiles, so results must not be so different in terms of how Google indexes these sites.

[tedster]

Maybe I didn't pick up your meaning very well, then. When you say "both have next to nothing of unique content", do you mean they are using some kind of manufacturer's feed, then? I was thinking of a page with no real information but a kind of fake tag cloud.

[at2000]

Sorry I didn't make myself clear. They provide meaningful content, but not unique. Let's imagine I'm talking about widgets websites, that provide info about widgets produced by different manufacturers. Manufacturers provide their own description of widgets on their websites, so the websites in question republish these description on their websites.

The most of the traffic to these auto-generated tag pages are long tale, so the more pages in the index - the more traffic from Google.