SEO Blog Post- Week 5 (Site Readiness)

From material published on http://www.seocertification.org, I have started to learn a lot about site readiness. I was responsible for reading chapter 3 from the certification textbook for class this week, in which discussed two main ideas. First, it explained the different types of link building techniques  that are available to increase search engine optimization. Second, the chapter went into great detail about cloaking and doorway pages, which are two potentially unethical SEO practices.

According to my reading, there are three main types of linking to consider when studying site readiness. They can be considered the following:

1. One Way Linking
2. Reciprocal Linking
3. Triangular Linking

One way linking is when your link is put on a website without exchanging another link. Therefore, it can be considered the best way to improve your search engine ranking. One way linking also protects you from bad links, so search engines will be able to tell which links actually offer value to customers. The one major disadvantage to one way linking is that is usually beneficial in the long run, as opposed to it being helpful in the short term. Next, reciprocal linking is widely considered to be the most popular link building technique to date. It allows two websites to agree to link with one another, which can provide credibility to both parties involved in the link since both believe each link is relevant enough to trust. The main focus of reciprocal linking is to get quality links to generate traffic to a website and increase its ranking in search engines. Lastly, triangular linking attempts to fool search engines that it uses two websites, when in reality it is attempting to turn reciprocal linking into one way linking. Techniques are being developed to stop the ability to utilize triangular linking since it can be considered deceptive.

Another important topic I learned about this week was the difference between cloaking and doorway pages. Thus, cloaking is the process of serving different versions of a page based on identifiable information about a user. On the other hand, doorway pages are built to draw search engine visitors to your website to trick them into crediting you with a higher ranking. Doorway pages are considered an unethical SEO practice. 

Based on what I've read, an example of cloaking would be if a webmaster delivered one page to search engines for indexing, while also serving a different page to everyone else. To gain a better understanding about cloaking, here is a list of 5 common types that are used: 

1. User Agent Cloaking (UA Cloaking)- For Specific Agents
2. IP Agent Cloaking (IP Cloaking)- For Demographic Groups
3. IP & User Cloaking (IPUA Cloaking)- Combo of the two types listed above
4. Referral Based Cloaking- Basing delivery on specific referral strings
5. Session Based Cloaking- For sites that use session tracking techniques