Radisson SAS Busted for Black Hat SEO - Again

Filed Under: Articles, SEO, Linking Strategy

This is the second time Radisson SAS is getting busted for extensive use of black hat techniques, including doorwaypages and duplicate content. Read on as SEO Bomb unveil their linking strategy. Do you think Radisson SAS will be banned from Google again?

Update February 23rd 2006: Radisson SAS Removing Thousands of SEO Landing Pages

I used to write a bit for a Norwegian online magazine called E-guiden, one of the leading IT magazines dealing with e-commerce, e-business and marketing strategies.

A great relationship between owner of E-guiden, Gunnar Bråthen, and I resulted in a number of provocative articles and case studies. The biggest of them all; Gunnar cracking open the Black Hat SEO techniques used on a number of large corporations in Norway, including hidden pages, horribly designed low-tech doorway pages, extensive networks of cloaking sites and redirects.

The worst in the crowd was in fact one of the biggest hotel chains in Europe, Radisson SAS, with over 700 landing pages. Published back in October 2004, it created havoc among the SEO companies in Norway — some of the cases were so ugly, the sites got completely removed from Google’s index.

Radisson SAS Getting Banned in Google for the First Time

Radisson SAS used the Danish “SEO” company Netpointers to do the SEO work for them – the very same company that do SEO for Porsche.dk. And as David Naylor pointed out, both BMW and Porsche just recently got banned for doorway pages with redirects.

Not surprisingly, Netpointers use the same techniques on their own site: tons of duplicate doorway pages: site:netpointers-technologies.com “search engine optimization”

Anyway, on November 4th 2004, SAS Radisson got banned from Google for over two months. After removing tons of Doorway pages and low-tech JavaScript redirects, they got back into the index again on January 7th 2005.

One year later, I decided to follow up on them — do some research to see if they stayed clean. Of course they didn’t. On November 18th, I posted SEO Norway: Unveiling Monster linking Strategies. But that post, as it turns out, was only the beginning. Today, after looking at their SEO and linking strategy more closely, I’m even more surprised than what I was on November 18th.

SEO Landing Page & Link Strategy

Before we start the analysis of their linking strategy, let’s first cover some basics linking strategy and terminology.

Internal linking strategy is a very important aspect of SEO, and creating mininets on a site helps the search engines, and especially Google, to “understand” your site. A proper linking strategy helps the search engine to determine the theme of the different sections of your site and how they relate to each other. If you are familiar with HTML, it’s much like how you use the H tags to define the page hierarchy.

Your very basic spider trap consists of three items

A section sitemap
Amalgamation pages
SEO Landing pages

The Sitemap

The sitemap is simply a normal sitemap. I prefer to organize the sitemaps into sections. All the links that belongs to a certain section collected together using proper H tags to define page hierarchy. Each link points to an amalgamation page.

The Amalgamation Pages

The amalgamation page is a collection of similarly themed pages, for example different models of a product. For each model, you have a headline and a description, and the headline links to the SEO landing page.

SEO Landing Pages

This is the product page itself, with a detailed description and full product information, and depending on the function on the page, it may also contain call to action et cetera. The whole point of this is to make sure that the search engines understand your site structure.

However, it can easily be abused to produce large numbers of duplicate landing pages that is each targeted to a specific phrase — and that is exactly what SAS Radisson has done.

They have basically created hundreds of mininets linked together to one gigantic spider trap. If you want to see for your self, type in inurl:phrase site:radissonsas.com in Google.

The Basic Structure of Radisson SAS’s SEO Landing Pages

Sitemap
http://www.radissonsas.com/lang-english/phrase/

Amalgamation Page for the City of Stavanger
http://stavanger.radissonsas.com/lang-english/phrase/

SEO Landing Pages: Duplicate Content - Different keyword
http://stavanger.radissonsas.com/lang-english/phrase/holiday_in_stavanger.htm
http://stavanger.radissonsas.com/lang-english/phrase/holiday_norway.htm
http://stavanger.radissonsas.com/lang-english/phrase/holiday_stavanger.htm
http://stavanger.radissonsas.com/lang-english/phrase/no_holiday.htm

etc.

All of the SEO Landing Pages Link to the Same Destination
Radisson SAS Atlantic Hotel and Radisson SAS Royal Hotel

Here’s the list of keywords they’ve targeted for Stavanger – 45 in total, including typos

Notice how the description on the Amalgamation Page, the SEO Landing Page and the Destination Page is exactly the same. Also notice how they hide content inside a < noscript > tag on many, if not most of their pages:

Holiday in Stavanger
Holiday Norway
Holiday Stavanger
NO holiday
Stavanger city break
Stavanger holiday
Stavanger vacation
Vacation Norway
Accommodation in Stavanger
Accommodation Norway
Accommodation Stavanger
Accommodation Stavanger Norway
Accomodation in Stavanger - typo
Accomodation Stavanger - typo
Stavanger accommodation
Stavanger hotel accommodation
Stavanger Norway accommodation
Conference in Stavanger
Conference NO
Conference Stavanger
Stavanger conference
Hotel in Stavanger
Hotel Stavanger
Hotels in Stavanger
Luxury hotel in Stavanger
Quality hotel Stavanger
Stavanger city hotels
Stavanger hotel
Stavanger hotels
Hotel Norway Stavanger
Hotel Stavanger Norway
Hotels in Stavanger Norway
Hotels NO
Hotels Stavanger Norway
Norwegian hotel
Norwegian hotels
Stavanger Norway hotel
Stavanger Norway hotels
Norwegian resorts
Resorts in Norway
Resorts Norway
Stavanger resorts
Weekend in Norway
Weekend in Stavanger
Weekend Stavanger

Other sites owned by SAS Radisson
www.getmoresummer.com
www.joingetmore.com
www.getmoredenmark.com
www.getmoresweden.com
www.getmorenorway.com

All of which points to http://getmoreweekend.com/ via JavaScript

< body on Load= " location.href='http://getmoreweekend.com ' ; ">

Now, http://getmoreweekend.com has PR0. http://www.getmoreweekend.com has PR4. It strikes me as rather idiotic that they did’t do a 301 redirect to the www. version instead as all of the redirected domains has PR4 as well.

P3P page
Now this is something I honestly don’t understand the purpose of at all. The URL below show you a header template for most of the SEO Landing pages:

http://www.hamburg.radissonsas.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=seo/
RadissonSAS/topNavigation&language=en&languages=,en,de,&template=seo/
RadissonSAS/hotel&params=subPage=index.html|seo_page=seo_hamburg_
rsas|hotelCode=hamza&useSeo=true

For more header templates, go to http://www.wisenut.com/search/query.dll?q=useSeo%3Dtrue

If you use Live HTTP Headers for example, you’ll see a reference to http://raddissonsas.com/w3c/c3p.xml:

P3P: policyref=”http://radissonsas.com/w3c/p3p.xml”, CP=”UNI NOI COM NAV DEM ADM”

P3P is a platform for privacy preferences, but what gives? Looking at that URL more closely, you’ll see that the page is inside a frame. This is the real page:

http://searchportal.information.com/index.mas?epl=VFAXVE0DWlgVVRBeVwtAVw5ZB
14NW1YMBAhHWVxQWBZGWwxLWBYdVw5dRBNXFRNdBVEUCgxTUUcAalxcBQIFUw

So the question is what is the purpose of this? Is the SEO collecting money from the Google Ads? That doesn’t really make much sense either, as the page in question is practically invisible for anyone. Maybe they’re also in charge of SAS Radisson’s PPC program and artificially inflate the numbers on search that way? Who knows…