The Invisible Internet: Dark Pages

There are billions and billions of web pages on the world wide web. How much do we know about them? Very little. We know what we've seen. We know Yahoo and Google, MySpace and Twitter, Blogger and WordPress. But what about the other pages out there? Are they full of wonderful content that we have yet to discover? Certainly that makes up a portion of the remained, but are there any other categories that these unseen pages can fit into?

Yes, there certainly is. The world wide web is composed of pages that are (mostly) hyperlinked together. Each page's links influences the other pages because it serves as a potential avenue for people to traverse the web. It also affects the search rankings of those web pages. Google's PageRank is a well-known algorithm used to rank pages based on how many links point to it and the reputation of the pages that host those links. These pages may never be visited, but their existence affects which other pages show up in searches on search engines like Google. I call these pages "dark pages".

An illustration of the PageRank algorithm.

Dark pages are like dark mass. They are rarely observed, if ever, but we can infer their existence based on their effect on the rest of the internet. They have "mass" in that they can push other pages to better rankings. They are attached to other websites with hyperlinks, and they contribute "mass" to these websites that make them seem more important to search engines.

Now that I've spent a paragraph awkwardly trying to force the dark matter/dark pages parallel, I'll give you some evidence of the existence of dark pages. When searching Google for "garage door repair johns creek", you will find a Digg article: http://digg.com/news/story/Garage_Door_Repair_Johns_Creek_GA. This is a dark page. Don't be fooled by the fact that it's on the Digg domain. It's been Digg'd only twice, probably by the author and one other person that the author knows. Few people have ever seen this article, and for good reason, too. It's just a link to a company website that no one on a Social Bookmarking website would care about. This page exists solely to shape the internet that is shown to you when using search engines and nothing more.

A dark page linking to the website of an SEO firm's client.

If you dig a little deeper and look at the profile page for the person who posted that Digg article, http://digg.com/millclar, you will only see two articles posted by him. Neither of which are the above article. I'm not sure if this is because Digg has some bugs in it or if the author removed it himself. I believe the author periodically removes posts from his accounts in order to hide the websites that he has spammed to Digg for improved rankings, but I have no proof of this.

Several dark page articles linking to more SEO clients.

Searching deeper, I found the Digg poster's twitter page which has the username @cobbroof (http://twitter.com/#!/cobbroof). This twitter count is 100% spam and consists of nothing but retweets with links to websites that appear to be clients of Atlanta Web Pros (which I'm assuming is Millard Clark's employer.) Again, these tweets are not meant for people. The only people following this twitter account are other spam accounts and one Home Inspector that I can only assume is a former client of the SEO firm that Millard Clark works for. These tweets were made to be indexed by search engines to give rankings boosts to the clients of SEO firms.

An entire twitter account dedicated to linking to SEO clients. A dark page that affects what web pages we see without ever beeing seen itself.

It's a known fact the SEO firms don't always use the most ethical means of promoting their client's sites. That is not the point of this article. The point of this article is to enlighten you on the fact that the internet that is presented to you is only a very small part of the whole. The pages you see are presented to you because they were picked by an algorithm, and that algorithm is influenced by every page it scans. Although the portion of the internet you see every day is most familiar to you, its the hidden, dark pages of the internet that determine what content you see. In the end, it is the pages that you don't see that play the most important role in what you read in your web browser.

SEO in the Garage Door Repair Sector

Previously, I covered how a local competitor used multiple websites and phone numbers to confuse their customers and reduce competition. By showing several different faces to the customer, they give the illusion of choice. A customer might decide to choose between the top three companies in a Google search without even knowing that two (or even three) of those companies are the same. In this post, I'll go into some detail about their unethical SEO methods.

Doorway pages are one of the unethical methods used by some of our competitors to increase their search rankings. What are doorway pages? They are web pages that are filled with keywords that rank highly in search results but don't actually contain useful content for the end user. They are often computer-generated because they require a lot of unique content to be effective. Doorway pages with non-unique content are often quickly banned by search engines.

What's wrong with doorway pages? They offer little to no value to the visitor, and often they only exist to get the visitor to click through to the company's main website. Since the text is mass-produced, it is often low quality. An example of some text from a competitor's doorway page that doesn't flow very well and makes little sense:

Home owners throughout the Atlanta metro are may choose to seek the help of professionals who are easily accessible to garage door repair help when emergency situations arise. American Overhead Door, Inc. in Atlanta is one such an option, and people may choose to seek the services of those who offer services 24/7 support and assistance.

This excerpt sacrifices clarity for keyword density. Note the inclusion of the phrase "garage door repair" in the first sentence is very forced and doesn't seem to make sense. The second sentence repeats the keyword "service" to increase the keyword density. Again, this makes the page index better in search engines at the expense of actually providing any useful information to the visitor. The last three words, "support and assistance" are completely unnecessary and seem to only be included to meet some kind of keyword density quota that was set for the writer.

I reported this company's website as spam to Google. Here's a picture of the form I submitted on July 24, 2011:

Google's web spam submission form.

The spam reporting process is anonymous, so I won't hear back from Google about whether they have decided that this company is creating spam or not. Hopefully their search rankings will drop because of their behavior so that other companies with more ethical methods will have a better chance.

Have you encountered a problem company like this in your field before? What did you do about it, and what results did you get? I'm interested in hearing your feedback in the comments.

SEO Methods and Their Results

While researching Action Door's competitor's websites, I noticed some alarming SEO trends. They employed tactics that are, in my opinion, unfair. I may have a naive understanding of SEO since I am new to the field, but there is a difference between optimizing you site for search engines and downright gaming the algorithms that search engines use.

I'll give you a few examples of the changes I've implemented on the Action Door website and discuss them.

I began working on the SEO of the Action Door website on July 6, 2011. The first thing I did was establish a few metrics to measure the success of my SEO measures. I created a Perl script that checks the ranking of the Action Door website on Google for certain keywords. Setting this script to run once per day, I could then track the ranking of the Action Door website and get some feedback about the effectiveness of my SEO methods.

Google search rankings for Action Door with hidden keywords

I've read that many search engines ignore the keywords meta tag, so the first thing I did was to make the keywords tag on all of our webpages contain the same keywords that relate to our core competency: garage door repairs. I don't believe this had any effect on our search rankings. I then went through the text of our website and looked for text that referred to "garage door repair" without using those specific words. I looked for text where it said just "repairs" or it used a synonym. I replaced those phrases with some keywords to make Action Door rank better for searches for those keywords. I was careful not to change the meaning of any of the text as my aim was to simply optimize the current website for search engines. I didn't want to create content made specifically for search engines.

This simple addition had the effect of improving our search rankings for many pages. Our rankings went from the high double digits or not even ranking at all to being in the low double digits. These changes didn't really make us any easier to find since we were still on the second or third pages, but we were at least on the map.

Finally, I noticed that some keywords were only mentioned on a handful of pages whereas other keywords were mentioned on every single page. The keywords that were on every single page had much better results. The most interesting part is that the page that would make the most sense to be returned for those keywords was not the page that was returned by Google. The page that Google returned was not the most relevant, but the content of the other pages influenced that page's Google ranking. I know this paragraph is a little hard to understand, so I will summarize in a few short sentences:

The search rankings for one page on a site is dependent on the content of other pages on your site. If you site as a whole focuses on a keyword, then your site will get more results for that keyword but it won't necessarily be directed to the page that is most relevant. Unethical webmasters and SEO consultants will take advantage of this with keyword stuffing.

I feel that adding these keywords to every page of the Action Door website is an acceptable form of stuffing because the information that it conveys to the visitor is useful. The keywords I added to every page are the cities served by Action Door. I included content that would be applicable to anyone who visits our website for our core competency, garage door repair. If they are interested in contacting us for garage door services, then the first thing they should know is where we operate and if we can help them. (We serve Alpharetta, Cumming, Duluth, Dunwoody, Johns Creek, Marietta, Milton, Norcross, Roswell, Sandy Springs, Suwanee, & Woodstock, and we can repair any garage door or garage door opener!)

So far these methods have been effective in getting Action Door on to the first page for roughly one third of my target keywords.

Exposé: "Confusion" Door Company

Have you ever comparison shopped? Called multiple companies to compare prices? Most of us do it because we want the best price from the most reputable company we can find. Unfortunately, there are some untrustworthy companies out there that know this and take advantage of people who comparison shop. They create dozens of bogus web sites in an effort to be the top-ranking result for any garage door-related search. Not only that, but they post different phone numbers on each web page to further your confusion and trick you into believing that you have more choices about which company you call to service your garage door or opener.

Take the company "American Overhead Garage Doors, Inc." for instance. (We call them "Confusion Door" with good reason. You'll see why in a bit.) See the screen shot of their home page (aogaragedoor.com) below. At first, they look like they might be a good choice to call if you're having problems with your garage door. They've got pictures of their service men in uniform with well-labeled trucks and a seal that proclaims "ALL GARAGE DOOR WORK \ 100% GUARANTEE \ CALL TODAY". Everyone likes guarantees, but what are they guaranteeing anyway?

The home page for aogaragedoor.com.

Better not look any closer. You might not like what you find. But let's look closer anyway. You see that truck in their banner? What's that phone number on it?

Multiple phone numbers displayed on the website for "Confusion" Door Company.

Huh? That's interesting. The phone number on their truck doesn't match the phone number on their website. I guess they changed numbers. That makes sense, right? Nope. It doesn't make any sense at all. Most businesses want their customers to be able to call them back. It's called repeat business, and it's the best kind of business you can get. It doesn't cost you a thing, and it keeps coming back. Can you imagine your local pizza place changing their number? No! That would never happen. They like being in your speed dial. "Confusion Door" changes their number to hide from their old customers.

They are ranked very highly if you search Google for the phrase "garage door repair johns creek". Check out the results below. Click on the image to get a picture that you can actually read.

Google search results for "garage door repair johns creek" showing the many faces of "Confusion" Door Company.

At first glance, you might say they show up exactly once in these search results. They're the top paid result, but they're nowhere in the organic results below. That isn't entirely true. In fact, the very first organic result (after the places results) is the same company. Yes the page titled "Johns Creek Ga, Garage Door, Repair, Overhead, Sensor, Spring ..." with the link to garagedoorroswell.com is them. How do I know? I clicked on that link, and this is what popped up:

Another website on another domain for the same "Confusion" Door Company.

Gee that looks familiar. Yes, this website with a completely different domain name is the same company. It's got the same pictures, the same phone number on the truck, and the same color scheme. But look closely! See the phone number in their banner? It's different! That's the third phone number and second web site we've seen for the exact same company.

When I came across this oddity while researching our top-ranked competitors on Google, it sparked my curiosity. I wondered "how many phone numbers and websites do they have!?" So I did some digging. I used the Search by Image extension for Google Chrome to search for other websites that had similar images to those on the two websites I had already found. In this way I was able to uncover 13 different websites operated by this company with 12 different phone numbers!

Why does this company have so many websites and phone numbers? It's their modus operandi, their "mode of operating". They trick you into thinking that you are comparison shopping between the companies that have the best presence on the internet. Then when they show up, they pressure you into letting them perform repairs you don't need and overcharge you for what they do. Finally, if you call to complain to take advantage of their "lowest price guarantee", they tell you that you're calling the wrong number. When you try to find the right number, you can't. They all call the same office and all the people that work there will tell you the same thing, "Sorry, wrong number."

Here's a list of their websites and phone numbers. It probably isn't comprehensive, but it should be enough to give you a good idea of what establishments like these look like. I am providing this list as a service so that you can avoid having to deal with them.

aogaragedoor.com

garagedooratlantaga.com

garagedoordecatur.com

garagedoorlawrenceville.com

garagedoorlithonia.com

garagedoorrepairduluthga.com

garagedoorrepairdunwoodyga.com

garagedoorrepairkennesawga.com

garagedoorrepairpeachtreecityga.com

garagedoorrepairsandyspringsga.com

garagedoorrepairsmyrnaga.com

garagedoorrepairtuckerga.com

garagedoorroswell.com

404-369-5471

404-369-7831

404-566-5269

404-566-5285

404-566-7164

404-566-8536

678-369-3406

678-439-1780

678-453-8490

678-546-8383

770-854-0532

770-854-0532

Do you know of any other companies like this? Let me know if you do, and I'll add them to the list.

Meet the Team: Kurt

Hi there! We haven't met yet. My name is Kurt Tomlinson, and I am the webmaster for Action Door. My time is split between attending classes at Georgia Tech, interning at AMD, and maintaining the Action Door website. At Georgia Tech, I'm studying to become an Electrical Engineer, and I will be graduating in December 2011. As Action Door's webmaster, I'm tasked with making sure the Action Door website remains up to date and easy to find on major internet search engines like Google.

In the days before the internet, the phone book was king. For services that people only needed once in a while, like garage door repair, there was no better way to find a service company than the phone book. Things have changed since then, and the most common method of finding a service company now is with the help of a search engine. In this post-phonebook age, Action Door has turned from the Yellow Pages to Google to ensure that our customers can continue to find us. My job is to make it easy for new customers to choose us for their garage door service needs.

The most depressing kind of dead trees: phone books.

Action Door is my parent's garage door repair and service company. The money my hard-working and honest parents have earned from operating Action Door since 1986 has been used to put both my older brother Darryl and me through college at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA. (I like to think of us as recipients of the very selective Action Door scholarship.) Darryl graduated with high honors from Georgia Tech in 2007 (BSME) and is currently pursuing his MBA at the University of Memphis.

Tech Tower in downtown Atlanta, GA.

I've started this blog with one purpose in mind: to build a better relationship with our customers. To that end, we will be using this blog to answer all your questions about garage door repair, chronicle our efforts to continually improve the services we offer you, and provide some warnings to protect you from unscrupulous garage door service companies.

If you have any questions that you would like for us to answer, please ask them below. Comments and suggestions are welcome as well. We look forward to hearing from you!