Filed Under: Articles, SEO, Linking Strategy
Sverre Sjøthun, founder of SEO Bomb.com, is one of the leading Search Engine Optimization Specialists in Norway, and is now working for one of the biggest, most successful online gambling sites in the world, Bodog.com. Read on as he unveils the linking strategy of one of the biggest hotel chains in Europe, Radisson SAS.
I’ve written and assisted in writing articles for the Norwegian online magazine E-guiden , one of the leading online 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.
Published back in October 2004, it created havoc among the SEO companies in Norway. Some of the cases so ugly, the sites got completely removed from Google’s index.
Black Sheep or Black Hat - or Both?
The worst in the crowd was in fact one of the biggest hotel chains in Europe, Raddisson SAS, with over 700 landing pages - they were banned for over two months. And here’s where it gets even worse. They are still doing it! A quick check in Google reveals over 25 000 of these SEO landing pages.
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.
Or you can check the 44(!!) pages they have for the phrase Hotels Stavanger(my hometown in Norway): intitle:hotels intitle:stavanger inurl:phrase site:radissonsas.com. What you will see is stunning.
There is one big improvement over the original structure, and that is the removal of the redirect JavaScript they previously used.
<script language=”JavaScript”>var r=”"+document.location;var idx=r.indexOf(”csref”);
if(idx>0){r=”http://ip_”+r.substr(idx+6);}else{r=document.referrer;if(r.length>0)
{idx=r.indexOf(”://”);if(idx<0){r=”http://ip_”+r;}else{r=”http://ip_”+r.substr(idx+3);}}}
if(r!=”"&&document.cookie.indexOf(”ICSref=”)<0)document.cookie=”ICSref=”+escape(r)+”;
path=/”;</script>
However, they have still kept the basic structure of their meganets, and it is as follows:
lang-english/phrase/
accommodation_oslo.html
city_oslo_hotel.html
conference_oslo.html
hotel_oslo.html
hotels_and_oslo.html
hotels_in_oslo.html
hotels_oslo.html
index.html
oslo_accommodation.html
oslo_conference.html
oslo_hotel.html
oslo_hotels.html
sitemap.html
lang-francais/phrase/
chambres_ho_otel_oslo.html
confe_erence_oslo.html
conopkeyw010.html
ho_otel_a_a_oslo.html
ho_otel_oslo.html
ho_otels_d_oslo.html
index.html
oslo_ho_otel.html
sitemap.html
Et cetera.
Scroll to the end of one of the SEO landing pages, and you will see how the current page is inter linked with a huge net of other landing pages on their site. These pages have one purpose: drive traffic to their site. This is systematic exploitation of the power of linking strategy in a mega scale.
And as if that wasn’t enough, they have also targeted typos. A search on accomodation in oslo show us Radisson SAS on 1st place.
Now, targeting for typos is not a biggie, everybody does that, but I question the agressiveness used by the SEO. It is clever(or at least until you get busted and banned), certainly, but is it in compliance with the search engines own guide lines for Search Engine Optimization?
Compliance with Search Engines?
Here’s what Google says about SEO:
“Another illicit practice is to place “doorway” pages loaded with keywords on the client’s site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO’s other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.”
Now, how do you define a “doorway page” or a “SEO landing page”? Well, in my opinion, if the page has the sole purpose of attracting traffic to a site, and most certainly if there’s a redirect involved, it is and should be illegal and you should get penalized for it.
If you create a, let’s call it a “SEO landing page”, that serve the purpose of both attracting visitors to your page and deliver the service or answer the question the visitor was looking for, is there a moral dillemma there? Personally, I think not, as both the needs of the corporation and the visitor gets served.
It is a proven fact that a sound and solid interlinking strategy do much for a web site’s rank in search engines, and contribute to a substantial boost in traffic. This, combined with quality content and an effective navigation strategy will do much to improve the bottom line of your company.
In the case of Radisson SAS, what we see is clearly Search Engine Spam with duplicate pages where the only difference is the keywords targeted and much, much more. I’ll follow up this case and provide an exstensive report where I reverse engineer their whole site, provide in-depth info on their linking strategies and more. In all honesty, I would not be too surprised if they got banned in Google — again.
Sverre Sjøthun
3 Comments so far
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Dammned Radisson SAS. I will follow up this one as I did the first time. Regards Gunnar seoSPAMcop
By Gunnar Bråthen on 12.16.05 8:14 am | Permalink
Sounds great. You know where to find me if you need any assistance 
Sverre
By Sverre Sjothun on 12.16.05 9:10 pm | Permalink
intersting…i will surely watch this topic more
By professional web designer on 01.07.06 10:15 am | Permalink
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