Gateway Pages - Google Seems to Include These Again

[agent10]

I have been in SEO since 1990 and there have been many changes, yet looking at the search results on Google right now it is like I have been pushed back in time.

We all know that Google now includes a multiple number of pages from one website in search results, sometimes all 10 results, (how on earth can this be useful to a user), but websites with gateway pages homing in on just one specific keyword are just taking over the results. Certainly in the travel sector.

If you do a search for cheap ?, then suddenly you get 10 results all gateway pages all from same site for cheap ? ? a three word term.

Then look at <spam target phrase> as a search, the hackers using every trick in the book, and yet these sites are not removed by Google - what is going on?
.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:14 pm (utc) on Feb 7, 2013]
[edit reason] removed specific search phrase [/edit]

[goodroi]

Spam never stopped working. The individual tactics from 10-15 years ago might have changed but the general concepts are still the same. Its just much harder to earn enough money before Google catches up and gives your site a beatdown so fewer people take that path.

If you have a site with big enough quality signals you can often get away with it longer at least until you get outed. Some of the different groups in Google (like Adwords & Chrome) have even been implicated in spammy techniques.

[incrediBILL]

;)

I have been in SEO since 1990 and there have been many changes

You mean like the creation of search engines in 1993?
[en.wikipedia.org...]

... or the first use of the term SEO in 1997?
[en.wikipedia.org...]

According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the phrase "search engine optimization" probably came into use in 1997.[3] The first documented use of the term Search Engine Optimization was John Audette and his company Multimedia Marketing Group as documented by a web page from the MMG site from August, 1997

:)

I'm assuming that 1990 was a typo?

[1script]

There was a thread recently about doorway/gateway/site search pages showing up in Google search results, all aimed at artificially inflating user experience metrics. Well, in their most benign form of course - we were discussing big sites which would *never* spam [wink-wink]. Here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[agent10]

Yes a TYPO :( meant 1999 doh when I bought my first domain names.

[indyank]

Engagement in the new SEO buzzword.

[1script]

Engagement in the new SEO buzzword

Or simply sending visitors in circles around your own site, looking for the information they were promised by the Google SERP title/description snippet in the first place.

[diberry]

LOL @ 1990 typo - I was scratching my head there, too.

I have to strongly agree that spam has never stopped working, and suggest that we need to question everything Google tells us about SEO and ranking.

I recently talked to someone who believes the way to overcome/avoid Penguin and Panda is to use improved tools for article spinning and pagerank manipulation. He runs a startup that actually makes real money with a link farm network and no original, fresh content, and they have not been harmed by the zoo animals. He anticipates they might, and this is why he's making his auto-tools more sophisticated.

That's who's making money out there. Aside from the sites that can actually afford to pay writers and photographers to generate really quality stuff.

This person actually has a friend at Demand Media, too (Ehow). He's trying to mimic what they're doing, only on an extremely low budget with no paid writers at all. It's just content farming, the thing Google came out against years ago, but obviously they're not all that against it. This guy I talked to feels that the zoo animals are strictly excuses for Google to get rid of people they see as a threat to their business model... which as we all recently learned, now involves scraping other sites' content and using it in Knowledge Graph the way they got away with scraping Yelp results for Google Places. Ditto on the new image search. A year ago, I would have written this guy off as paranoid. Now... I'm still not convinced, but his position seems a lot more plausible to me. If you're already a de facto monopoly, how do you grow your business? All you can do is kill off even more competition.