Can somebody please tell me what exactly a ghost page is? How can we create a ghost page?
I have very little information about it, like ghost pages are used by firms for promotional purposes.
Simply put, it's deliberate deception of search engines for SEO purposes. It's bad practice.
Longer answer:
Say you're optimizing your cheese-selling site. You want people to find it when googling "cheese". So you would create a bunch of content where "cheese" has a high keyword density of 12 % or so. Of course, this renders the page pretty useless for the user - the user just wants an image, some data on the cheese and a header, but that isn't SEO-friendly enough for you.
So, you'll create all the content you need for your SEO purposes and serve that up - in an if/else statement. Basically, if the visiting computer is GoogleBot, you'll serve up all that great text. If it's not GoogleBot, you'll serve up correct content.
So a Ghost Page (more accurately known as Shadow Page) is pretty much just a (bad) way for you to get ranking that you don't deserve.
Related
I've read many links trying to figure out how to tell Google not to index parts of a page. All the answers seem to be no, or do something lame like use IFrames. In our case legal wants a lengthy disclaimer in the footer on every page. This is causing an SEO issue. Any brand new techniques to deal with this?
In our case legal wants a lengthy disclaimer in the footer on every page. This is causing an SEO issue.
No it is not for Google. If it is present on every page, then it will be considered as boiler plate content rather than primary content for the relevancy and indexation of each page. Boiler plate content is ignored for rankings.
Google knows that sometimes content must be written on all pages for legal reasons. It does not penalize such websites dixit John Mueller in his hangout videos.
Sorry, this is a bad question. I don't even know what the title should be. I'm a total noob at making websites so this might be easy to find but I just don't know the terminology to search for. I cannot find anything about how to do this...
What I want to do is have something like references/variables that I can use in a block of text and it will automatically get replaced with whatever value should be there. Best way I can think of to describe it would be if I was using the site as a design doc for a game or something, I would be able to type in [Title] or something similar on any page and when it loads that text would be replaced with whatever my Title is. That way If I ever change titles, names, classes, races, places, items, etc... they would only have to be changed in 1 place and the change would be reflected everywhere.
I notice if I add a link to a page it will automatically use the Title of that page as the text of the link. That is almost exactly what I want. Except when I change the Title of the other page the text of the link remains as the original text. It doesn't get updated to the new Title and that is not at all what I want.
Also, I want to do this in Google Sites and as simply as possible. I don't really want to use a database. I was hoping Google Sites would have some kind of funcionality for this.
I don't believe this is possible (on Google Sites) and likely you need to consider a hosted solution.
Quoting the answer from this relevant post:
You should consider hosting your solution using Google's App Engine
instead of Google Sites. You can set it up so it uses PHP (see link
below), you can configure it to use your domain name and you get
enough CPU, disk and bandwidth allowance to serve around five million
page views for free each month, if you are serving more than that,
their prices are extremely competitive.
Google App Engine:
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/whatisgoogleappengine.html How
to setup PHP using Google App Engine: http://blog.caucho.com/?p=187
Also I'm not sure how your PHP skills are but if you're unfamiliar with it then this should help to get you started.
Would like to garner opinions. We've created a website for a gay members club and they wanted the default landing page to mysterious with little information on it.
As such the Default.aspx only contains a form asking for some personal details. Users can click a button to skip this content and go to an AboutUs page.
The problem is, because we cannot control what information Google uses for the site description in search results, it is picking up the forms fields - which obviously do not makes sense as a description.
I think there are two options to counter this:
Use Robots.txt to block access to Default.aspx and only allow access to AboutUs.aspx
Write a description and title in a H1 tag but make the text colour the same as the background colour
Could I get opinions which method people will think is best for search results?
Thanks.
I would not block or try and deceive Google.
Make sure the title tag for the page is good and descriptive. Around 70 characters to explain what the website is about.
Same goes for your meta description. About two sentences to continue on from the title information.
I was wondering what would be the best way to achieve a multi-language template based website. So say I want to offer my website in Englisch and German there are some different methods. My interest is mainly about SEO, so which would be the best way for search engines.
The first way that I often see is using different directories for each language, for example www.example.com for English and www.example.com/de/ for the German translation. The disadvantage of this is: when changing a file, ist has to be changed in every directory manually. And for search engines the two directories would be concerned as duplicate content, wouldnt they?
The second way I know is just using some GET value like www.example.com?lang=de and then setting a cookie. But this way search engines probably wont even find the different languages.
So is there another way or which one is the best?
I worked on internationalised websites until this year. The advice we always had from SEO gurus was to discriminate language based on URL - so, www.example.com/en and www.example.com/de.
I think this is also better for users; if i bookmark a page in German, then when i come back to it, i get a page in German even if my cookies have expired. Similarly, i can do things like post the URL on Facebook, and have my German-speaking friends click on it and get a site in German.
Note that if your site serves multiple countries, you should handle those along with language - so, you might have example.com/de-DE, example.com/en-GB, example.com/en-IE, etc.
However, this should not involve duplication. Instead, you should set your application up to process the URL, extract the locale information, and then forward the request internally to a locale-independent page. So, a request for example.com/de-DE/info and a request for example.com/en-IE/info should both be passed to /info.jsp (or i'm guessing info.php in your case). That page should then be coded to emit text in the appropriate language, using a page-level localisation mechanism.
Things are a bit trickier if you want the URLs themselves to be localised (eg example.org/de-DE/anmelden vs example.org/en-IE/sign-in). However, the same principle applies: extract the locale, then forward to a common page. The difference is that there must be more sophistication in figuring out what the page is from the URL; you will need a mapping from natural language in the URL to the page filename.
I have a search engine that searches albums.
For each music album, I have a page.
So, the work flow goes like this:
People search for music titles
The search engine displays a list of albums.
People click on an album to go to a details page.
I want google to index my front page and the details page. I want the details page to be highly ranked. How can I build a sitemap for this?
By the way, I have about 5 million albums (but I want the top 1000 ones to be highly ranked on google)
You would not use a sitemap for that many results. You would want each album to appear as a page with a unique URI to reference that page. That way the search engine can crawl your site by crawling links since search bots cannot submit form data. Each of those URIs should be simple, meaning limited to this part of the URI syntax:
scheme://authority_segment/path
Program your web application to remove and throw away any extraneous data, such as query string or parameters. If you do this you have to be sure that you are watching for URI poisoning or SQL injection even through means of character encoding.
How can I build a sitemap for this?
By pulling the addresses out of your database and creating a XML file with a high priority for some selected pages. Somehow I think that isn’t your real question …
If I wanted to automate building a site map for a site like this, I'd employ Python. I'd pretty much write everything from the ground up (except the data store access). The format is quite simple.
I'm not sure I quite understand your question...