Is this SEO black or white hat? Never seen this before

Hello everyone,

I've joined this forum to get an answer whether or not this is recommend. Forgive me for the long post. This claimed SEO company has been contacting ours, and we've sat down and listened to their presentations a couple times now, but I have a really bad feeling about these guys. They claim they use landing pages for optimization in the search engines. They make a bunch of these landing pages, that would look exactly like our current home page. They basically take our keywords and make each keyword into an actual page, that looks exactly like our home page. The landing page is only one page, so if a user clicks on one of the links it directs them to the actual home page of what they copied.

And so far they get their landing pages ranking high in the Organic side of Google and Yahoo within a weekend. How are they doing this? Why does there landing page rank so high within so little time. When asked at the presentations they won't tell us exactly how they do it. Our CEO of our company doesnt know a thing about SEO, and is ready to drop a ton of money towards these guys, and I cant talk him out of it. Please help me.

I'd be up for a phone conversation on this, I'd like to show someone the real website and all the other pages that this other company creates. I'll walk you through what I'm talking about. Someone help! Again willing to do a phone convo to show someone. 605-373-3905. Maybe I'm wrong as well too. I'd just like to show someone exactly what they are doing, and then get a yes or no if its Black hat or White hat.

No, Landing pages don't work, and are grey hat atleast.

This was a good SEO strategy 10 years ago. This company is behind the times.

This really worked when all you needed were keywords on the pages. Making a page to target each keyword made a lot of sense.

Now however, you need good quality incoming links. Landing pages are worthless without incoming links, and really the only way to get incoming links to the landing pages you describe would be black hat techniques (automatic or hidden linking).

You'll also find Google specifically says not to do this:

http://www.google.com/support/webmas...n&answer=35769

Quote:

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Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

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Ok so agreed on they are in the "grey" area. Is that all that bad? These landing pages are ranking very high in the Organic search results live 3rd or 4th depending on what key words you type into the engine. What's the worst that will come of it if use this method? How would I explain this to someone seeing that quick placement of 3rd or 4th in the organic ranking on why its bad?

What are the keywords?

I could make you #1 on "blind albino eskimos" but that doesn't mean you'll gain any value from it. SEO firms regularly fool clients through this, they get them ranked well for some 3 or 4 word phrase, when in reality such a phrase has almost no competition, and no traffic.

Now, if they're using an artificial or hidden linking scheme to power these doorway pages, and if you're caught, your website gets permanently banned from the search engines. That really sucks.

So, you have to ask yourself, is the reward (in real traffic, not rankings) worth it for the risk of potentially losing all search engine traffic?

For most people the answer is no.