SEO trick: How do they do this?

[Clinton]

I'm increasingly finding that sites are ranking for terms that they have no content on whatsoever. And they rank only because they dynamically insert into the page every term that leads to their site.

For example, I was searching for a flash player for the Sony Xperia X10 and this page came up. The only reason they seem to be ranking is because they have this "incoming search terms for this article" section into which they insert every term anyone has ever found them on. They've also made each of those terms a link back to the page itself.

It's dumb of Google to be fooled by this, in my opinion, and pretty frustrating for searchers, but ...

How do these sites do it?

[JJMcClure]

For non-competitive keyword phrases like the one you were using there could be a ton of reasons why pages rank where they do, including the fact that they're part of an authoratitive site, even though they have no links of their own and don't appear to be particularly relevant. They rank well because the other pages that Google determined were relevant to your search were even worse than the one you referred to.

If you found a page lower down the rankings which was more relevant, had great backlinks and content, was part of a massively relevant and authorative site but was still outranked by crap pages, that would blow my theory out of the water.

[Clinton]

Rich, I agree the site needs to have some reputation to start with, but for sites that do this trick seems to be working very, very well to get floods of long tail traffic that they wouldn't normally attract. I suppose we could debate whether it works - and the ethics of it - that would be interesting but it would also be cool if someone could tell me how this trick of dynamically inserting search terms into the page works.

Incidentally, for the flash player Xperia X10 search I am seeing pages lower down that are worthier candidates

[benitez17]

They can see what pages are referring people to their site, so they can pull the query terms out of the referring URL and and add them to a database table for use later or just insert them into the page right then.

[Clinton]

Yup, that's it, benitez17. But how does one do it? Is there software? Do you have to get some js written specifically for your site?

[Andy]

Hi Clinton,

Here's what I got in my search Attachment 102 It seems fairly relevant to me at first glance. Is it possible your browser got hijacked? After a couple of battles with hijackers, I always tend to suspect this first when I start getting strange results.

Other than that, I would guess some Black Hat SEO going on. Cloaking was a big deal not all that long ago. It still might be. I knew some people who could drive traffic to just about any page doing this. I have no doubt some form of cloaking still exists, but that is as far as my knowledge goes.

Andy

[benitez17]

Clinton, there's some sample code here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1680579

However, it took me longer to find that page than it would have taken me to just write it myself, and I didn't find anything else, so I don't know if there are any supported scripts. I would think there is a wordpress plugin for it, but I wasn't able to find one.

If you want something like this for this site or one of your other sites, feel free to contact me about it, or we can discuss it here.

[Clinton]

Thanks, benitez17, is php the only way then? And that won't work on pages that are already .htm, would it?

Andy, the site I linked to in the OP is with you as it was with me, in fourth place for that term.

[benitez17]

It should be possible with Javascript as well, or you can add a setting to htaccess to use php on .htm pages.

[flipfilter]

The last time I got this to work was at the end of 2009, so whether it's still valid I'm unsure but in a nutshell

1) Retrieve the search query that the user used to find your page. Check this against a database or flat file of existing queries and if it's a new query, insert. Another option is to integrate into the Adsense API and pull the list of terms from there but this is less effective.

2) Have a dynamic page that rewrites the Title, H1, Desc, H2, alt, title, image names and copy to make the page seem relevant to that keyword. A little copy spinning never hurt at this point. In the template, use Google news RSS to pull an RSS feed of that keyword (or its closest match) and insert somewhere into the page (although this probably will make your page look spammy, I'm guessing you wouldnt be using this method if quality content was your aim)

3) Take that keyword, form your dynamic url, and autobookmark this using a script and any bookmarking site that will take submission through this method (or use something like Onlywire). Submit the url to be pinged.

4) The page should be indexed in the SERPS providing your site has a fair amount of authority.

I've tried this with and without the bookmarks, and I've noticed that it seems to disappear in the serps without some form of external link to it.


J