Search Engine Abusers and Offenders Three-Way Linking and Pagejacking and Cloaking
Cloaking a practice done by black hat SEO's to display key word stuffed pages to Search Engines and a different page to actual users.
Pagejacking is referred as to copy others web page and put forward it to the illegal search engines by telling it as your own. To a certain extent pagejacking includes page cloaking.
Pagejacking is almost as the pinching copyrighted contents.
You have two websites, redwebsite.com and bluewebsite.com. I have one site, qrs.com. You offer to link bluewebsite.com to qrs.com in return for me linking qrs.com to redwebsite.com.
Sounds like a pretty good idea, true or false?
Sadly, false. We say sadly, because so-called three-way (3 way) links can frequently make a lot of sense from a marketing perspective. Unfortunately, from the point of view of a search-engine ranking program, especially Google's, they frequently look like nothing more than an attempt to spam the system and skew the page rankings.
The problem is that three-way linking has become an increasingly popular ploy among search engine cheaters. In fact, the number of three-ways implemented solely in an attempt to unfairly hype site rankings has become such a high percentage of all three ways that companies like Google have been virtually forced to take steps to end the abuse and protect the integrity of their returns. Why have many webmasters trying to play fast and loose with search-engine rules turned to three-way linking? Primarily because the search engines - particularly Google, have caught up with their abusive reciprocal-linking practices.
Since the earliest days of the Web, legitimate, ethical and relevant reciprocal links have been - and still are - the most powerful way to generate traffic to a website. Good links generate direct qualified traffic from compatible linked sites and can also improve your site's search-engine ranking to bring in even more hits.
The problem is that first-generation search-engine analysis programs simply counted the number of links on a site and gave a better rating to those with the most links. The results of early search engine programs lack of sophistication included the link farm, full duplex automated linking networks, free for all links pages, and other bad practices designed to flood a site with random links having nothing to do with the site's content and of absolutely zero value to the site's visitors.
Responding to this abuse, search engine crawlers were re-programmed to actually analyze links - to follow them and see if they are relevant, to pay attention to whether buckets of two-way links are being poured into a site all at once, to check whether link content is fresh or stale. Stymied in their attempts to beat the ranking odds with phony two-way linking schemes, some operators have turned to three-way linking to generate bogus one-way links. Here's how they work it.
Scenario One: A person with an e-commerce site they want to promote, let's call it UpTheSearchEngines.com, buys a bunch of domain names and erects websites for all of them. He than creates one-way links from the more or less bogus sites to UpTheSearchEngines.com, the site he's trying to spam Google with. In theory, Google's analysis program will see all the links from these supposedly independent sites to UpTheSearchEngines.com and think "Wow, something good must really be happening at UpTheSearchEngines.com, I'd better give it a top-ten ranking." In practice, the analysis program will deduce that most of the sites pointing to UpTheSearchEngines.com are part of an incestuously linked in-house network of sites running off a single domain address and controlled by the same person. Having determined this, the ranking program will usually punish the offender with a reduced ranking.
Scenario Two: Someone approaches you and says, "Let's do some reciprocal linking, you put up a link to my UpTheSearchEngines.com site and I'll give you one link on each of my three other sites, ILoveSearchEngines.com, IHateSearchEngines.com and WhoNeedsSearchEngines.com." This sounds enticing, here's a person offering you three links for the "price" of one. What's really going on here? What's probably going on is that the generous webmaster with the three-for-one proposition is trying to create links to UpTheSearchEngines.com without putting up any reciprocal links from UpTheSearchEngines.com to your site or other partner sites. Again, the goal is to trick searches engines into thinking UpTheSearchEngine.com has a degree of popularity and importance far beyond that indicated by its legitimate links, keywords, metatags, and traffic statistics.
The reasoning goes like this: If all these other sites are linking to UpTheSearchEngines.com without getting anything - even a link - in return, UpTheSearchEngines.com must be a fantastic site and should get a high rank. Scenario Two, like Scenario One, works a lot better in theory than it does in practice.
Like French pigs trained to hunt the most elusive truffles, new generation search-engine ranking programs can usually sniff out even the most cleverly concealed scheme of this type and instantly punish offenders.
As with so many issues relating to search engine rankings, what we really know about how Google and other engines handle both legitimate three-way linking and deliberate three-way abuse attempts is more a matter of conjecture, circumstantial evidence and anecdotal tales of horror than it is of hard facts. In particular, little is known about the direct effect of three-way linking on those sites at the reciprocal ends of the triangle - in the above example, that's "you" the person who "bought" the three-for-one linking deal.
According to some search engine optimization experts, search engines only take punitive action against sites benefiting from the one-way links, others contend that even the sites providing the links can be down-rated at least slightly by participating in the practice.
As with so many issues relating to search engine rankings, what we really know about how Google and other engines handle both legitimate three-way linking and deliberate three-way abuse attempts is more a matter of conjecture, circumstantial evidence and anecdotal tales of horror than it is of hard facts. In particular, little is known about the direct effect of three-way linking on those sites at the reciprocal ends of the triangle - in the above example, that's "you" the person who "bought" the three-for-one linking deal.
According to some search engine optimization experts, search engines only take punitive action against sites benefiting from the one-way links, others contend that even the sites providing the links can be down-rated at least slightly by participating in the practice.
Frankly, it probably doesn't matter. Three-way linking of the types described above is almost certainly going to diminish your Google page ranking at least slightly because it invariably produces both forward and backward links that have little or no relevance to the content on your site. And content, relevant content, is, especially as far as Google is concerned, king. In fact, there is only one place in which good quality, highly relevant onsite and linked content is more important than it is in Google's virtual brain and that is in the flesh, blood and neural pathways of your customers' and potential customers' hearts and minds.
Considering the heavy opaque veil cloaking so many search-engine operations, it's probably best to view three-way linking with the same degree of skepticism you'd apply to any new strategy alleged to produce substantial search engine gain without any of the pain associated with upgrading your site and its contents.
Considering the heavy opaque veil cloaking so many search-engine operations, it's probably best to view three-way linking with the same degree of skepticism you'd apply to any new strategy alleged to produce substantial search engine gain without any of the pain associated with upgrading your site and its contents.
The reason to be skeptical is evident: When it comes to linking and search-engine rankings, discretion is by far the better path of valor. Getting away with cheating is not nearly as easy today as it once was and getting caught can be very expensive in terms of reduced search engine-generated traffic.
continues ...Search Engine Abusers and Offenders Three-Way Linking, Pagejacking and Cloaking ...page 2
