Backfiring Philippine SEO Campaigns

As discussed in SEO Philippines Yahoo! Groups:

Sinungaling

INQ7 reports that Google bombing on Arroyo and officials backfire. That is not the case. Google never directs a user to a different URL from the search result page. The search for [sinungaling] leads to:

When the user clicks, he is sent to the Young Radicals page, apparently by Google. But is actually the Office of the President’s web server that was set up to do it. It checks if the user was sent by Google using the Referrer header. (Mispelled as “Referer”). Here is a manual request using telnet for a TCP connection.

telnet www.op.gov.ph 80
Trying 202.91.163.10…
Connected to www.op.gov.ph.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
GET /profiles_bunye.asp HTTP/1.0
Referer: http://www.google.com/search?q=sinungaling
Host: www.op.gov.ph

HTTP/1.1 302 Object moved
Connection: close
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 09:49:31 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
Location: http://youngradicals.blogspot.com
Content-Length: 154
Content-Type: text/html
Set-Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDSADCSSQA=DFKMNBACAALHLIDFNDKAMLIE; path=/
Cache-control: private

This is an instruction for the browser to go to that page instead. If you open the page normally by typing it into your browser, the “Referer” header will be absent and the page will open normally.

Philippine Star Pinay

Now, if you search for the term [pinays], this Philippine Star page page comes out: Most comprehensive to surf beautiful pinays. What?

In search engine optimization, this is called a doorway page - explicitly created to lure search engine users. In this case, they are targetting the keyword “pinays.” But they have gone overboard.

To make things worse, the links in the page point a blank page with nothing but “Hello.” And, the logo of the site points to a company at www.e-search-engine-optimizations.com. Gone. They must have closed shop with their sloppy work.

Before hiring an SEO firm, I think philstar.com should fix access to their Philippine Star articles and archives first. The site is notorious for not keeping articles for a period of time.

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