FAQ's on sites: The black hat way. (DIRTY trick, no penalties as far as I know ;)
- SEO |
All text that is red is from my old, unedited post, ignore this.
All green text is a safe, alternate route.
Well, let's call it grey hat. You're not really hurting the users in any way, but you might be tricking Google slightly.
I completely forgot about this technique- remembered it when I read friend's post on FAQ's and their usefulness.
About a year ago I was working for a software development firm- this is where I was introduced to SEO (I was extremely new to the game- hell- I'm still quite new).
I had an assignment to come up with a unique SEO trick. I did it and was rather happy with myself. More importantly, it seemed to have beneficial effects at the time.
I'm wondering whether it would work again.
The process: I have a small site and attempt to increase my presence by black hatting the number of pages I have.
[1] Write a detailed FAQ.
[2]
(a) Create a PHP page for each question (in my case I had 18 questions = 18 pages).[3]
(b) Name each page descriptively = "what-is-black-hat-seo.php"
(c) Post analytics, wordtracker, etc. code onto each page.
(d) Generate unique METAs for each page (mainly keywords)
(e) Be selective of the user agent.
IF useragent= Firefox, Chome, Opera, Safari, Explorer, THEN redirect to FAQ.php.
(e) Just add a "back to top of FAQ" link under each question's php page. Of course this isn't as ideal as user agent cloaking, but it turns out that's dangerous!
(a) Create an FAQ page with expandable/collapsable DIV's for each section.[4] Pick the prettiest keywords and cross-link abundantly (not too much now), between the pages.
(b) Use PHP INCLUDES to put all your question pages into the FAQ page.
[5] Link build: create inbound backlinks to these new pages. You'll find that these pages encompass a broader variety of topics than your site- since they're FAQ pages.
Clarification: Step 2(e) means we're tricking bots (e.g. Google) into not being redirected, and thinking each page is separate. Any common browser (aka real person) will simply be redirected the the FAQ page upon clicking one of your [seemingly many] pages on SERPs
Instead of tricking Google bot, we're just adding a link that takes any user that goes to one of the question pages via an SERP back to the FAQ page. The whole strategy is still well worth it, IMO.
So now, instead of indexing one FAQ page, Google indexes 19 pages, each themed and optimized differently.
This trick seemed to work last year- at the very least I had a plethora of new pages for Google to rank. The duplicate content risk was minimal, as the FAQ page was the only one that had any of the same content. I was not penalized at the time.
I've since lost access to this website, as I no longer work for the company I spoke of.
What do you guys think? Worthy of another go?
"Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve."
Thanks in advance... :)..... -Dustin