Hide Your Keywords From Prying Eyes…

One of the techniques I use to get keyword ideas is to look at what other spam sites out there are doing.

Quite frequently, they’ll have a sitemap that links to all of their pages and their homepage, of course, links to that sitemap.

This tends to give the sitemap page a better PageRank as well as having the sitemap show up in searches.

Now, having it show up in searches isn’t necessarily a *bad* thing but it can be a waste of traffic because you can’t put your adsense ads on a non-content page.

The second thing that’s troublesome about your sitemap page is that it’s trivial for someone to write a script to extract all of the keywords from your page.  (My pages are generated in a way that I protect myself from this approach but YACG and other content generators don’t as far as I know).

So - what’s a man to do?

Well, I was just reading an interview with Matt Cutts.  One of the things he went into depth about was the NoIndex meta tag.

Eric Enge: Can a NoIndex page accumulate PageRank?

Matt Cutts: A NoIndex page can accumulate PageRank, because the links are still followed outwards from a NoIndex page.

Eric Enge: So, it can accumulate and pass PageRank.

Matt Cutts: Right, and it will still accumulate PageRank, but it won’t be showing in our Index. So, I wouldn’t make a NoIndex page that itself is a dead end. You can make a NoIndex page that has links to lots of other pages.

For example you might want to have a master Sitemap page and for whatever reason NoIndex that, but then have links to all your sub Sitemaps.

This makes it trivial to hide your keywords (at least in Google) by simply adding a NoIndex meta tag to your sitemap page.  You can link to it as normal but it’ll never show up in Google’s index when people search for it.

That’s a very nifty trick in my ever so humble opinion!

G-Man