Interlinked pages for search engine optimization
March 29, 2005 6:33 AM   Subscribe

I need help researching the effects of interlinked web pages in search results...

My employer's site currently has a web of heavily interlinked pages, one for each city and state in the US (with our targeted keywords liberally applied to each link), intended to help grab some search traffic and boost our rankings in the results. I don't think it's working too well in its current incarnation; in fact it looks as if Google has given those pages a huge penalty.

I'm trying to find articles about this technique, how it works or doesn't work, and if it's worth our time to generate these pages at all. Can anyone point me in the right direction, or give me some better terminology to search with?
posted by patgas to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)
 
SEO, or "search engine optimization" is the terminology you're after. By and large, however, the kind of thing you're trying to do with a huge pile of largely identical low-content doorway pages (I assume that's what they are, since you speak of "generat[ing] them") is seen as gaming the system, and reputable search engines like Google will often penalize you -- in terms of pagerank -- for it.
posted by majick at 7:19 AM on March 29, 2005


Response by poster: I keep fairly up-to-date with SEO techniques, at least by reading several of the blog/journals out there about it. The problem I'm having is searching for this specific technique -- "the largely identical low-content doorway pages" -- since "search engine optimization" is ironically the least useful phrase to search for.

I'm not in favor of using these pages, so I'm looking for proof that they don't work, or maybe alternatives that I can compromise with.
posted by patgas at 7:48 AM on March 29, 2005


I think the term you are looking for is "link farm." There may be more finely-grained terms for variations on this theme.
posted by adamrice at 8:25 AM on March 29, 2005


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