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How to Generate Fillertext Content
How to Generate Fillertext Content For Your Phantom Pages and Shadow Domains by Ralph Tegtmeier aka fantomaster
Phantom pages are web pages offering highly optimized content intended for search engine spiders only. Shadow Domains are dedicated web properties focused on offering optimized content to search engines while redirecting human visitors to another site, typically a company's Core or main domain. So, technically speaking, Shadow Domains are web sites consisting entirely of cloaked pages not intended for human perusal.
More often than not, cloaking or IP delivery is a must for those companies whose web sites offer very little of what search engine spiders have always preferred ever since they were invented: text content.
Say you have a web site offering sports merchandise. Basically, your setup consists of dynamically generated catalogue pages feturing short product descriptions, price tags and a shopping cart system. Beyond this, your textual content is limited to category headers ("baseball caps", "golf club", "sports apparel", etc.)
In other words: search engine spiders have preciously little to go on in their quest to determine what your web site is actually about - and as a webmaster, you for your part don't have a lot of leeway to inoculate your pages with the keywords and search phrases you are targeting. Considering that you're in a highly competitive environment with thousands of other sites offering very similar programs, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that your chances at achieving good-to-excellent search engine rankings are pretty slim, and that's putting it very mildly.
Within this scenario, what you will want to do is to set up an industrial-strength cloaking outfit to feed the spiders what they need. You want to offer pages to the crawlbots they will be really happy with: rich in relevant content, with your targeted keywords or search phrases included at a good keyword density, featured in the page titles, in meta tags, site links, etc.
As these pages aren't intended for human consumption anyway, the actual text used needn't really make "sense" in any grammatical meaning of the word as long as its semantic content is fairly relevant to your pages' focus. Thus, you will, for example, want to avoid using text highly biased towards an in-depth discussion of web server security or hospital hygiene if you're actually targeting searchers interested in Dale Earnhardt sport socks, SF Giants World Series 2002 Custom Road Replica Jerseys or National Hockey League collectibles, to name but a few typical sports items.
Which, of course, places you squarely between a rock and a hard place: if you had all that content at your fingertips, you wouldn't have to go for IP delivery in the first place, right? Right! However, there are ways out of this predicament. Indeed, there's lot of freely available content out there on the Web you can make use of anytime.
Getting started Say you are targeting golf sports related search phrases in your search engine optimization efforts because you are selling PGA related merchandise on your web site.
Step 1: Selecting Relevant Content - Select a major search engine and enter a general search phrase related to your pages' overall PGA theme, e.g. "golf", "golf tournaments", "golf rules", "PGA", and, even better: "golf glossary".
Now, visit say the top 10 web sites featured in the SERPs, select any pages rich in relevant textual content and download or whack them.
Step 2: Generating Relevant Fillertext - 2.1 Next, concatenate the whacked pages into a single plain text file. You will now have a raw fillertext file for your phantom pages which, however will still require a fair bit of processing to be truly useful.
Hold it! Isn't this illegal copyright violation? It might very well be if you simply used copyright protected content whacked from competitors' or any other web sites as is, i.e. without further processing. This would be plain piracy, and we're certainly not going to advise you to go for it: ethics aside, the Web would make it really very easy to find you out if you were careless (or dumb) enough to simply use other people's content without their permission.
However, this isn't required at all. Instead, what you will have to convert your whacked content into is a topically focused "text corpus":
2.2 Strip the content of all HTML tags, e-mail addresses, links or URLs, JavaScript code, SSI code, and similar.
2.3 Now, sanitize it by eliminating all trademarks, company names, personal names and copyright notices. (Obviously you will not want to exclude those trademarks and product names directly related to your catalogue of products.)
2.4. Next, delete any other stuff you don't want to see your products associated with: this could be web page navigation code or system messages (e.g. "Go to top", "Your browser does not support frames", etc.), sexually explicit language, or anything else deemed highly irrelevant to a "natural language" environment focused on your targeted search terms.
2.5 Finally, juggle the text file, e.g. by chopping sentences in half and sorting the result by alphabet, by size, or whatever algorithm you prefer.
Seeing that your typical text will have been culled from several, probably hundreds of relevant web pages, after which it is processed with lots of stuff deleted and the results being re-sorted, this will effectively render the original copyrighted material quite unrecognizable. In fact, there will be no "copyrighted" (nor, for that matter, copyrightable) material left at all, and bingo - you're perfectly legal! (If in doubt, consult a lawyer versed in local and international copyright matters - this article refuses to be construed as binding legal advice!)
You have now created a highly relevant, topical fillertext file for all your golf related merchandise. Let's say you have named it "filler_golf.txt".
Obviously, you will proceed in a similar manner for all other themes or product categories you want to optimize for, thus generating several different fillertext files. These would be stored under different names, e.g. "filler_baseball.txt", "filler_football.txt", etc.
A note on size - If you plan on creating a large number of phantom pages, as you actually should (after all, search engine optimization is really a number game), make sure you create a fairly large fillertext file per set of targeted topics. The reason for this is that you will want to generate only unique pages with as great a variety of content as possible. This will also dramatically increase the traffic your phantom pages will attract for search term combinations you may not have thought of initially. (Check your current logs for search engine generated traffic and you will very probably find lots of search phrases - some more, some less weird - you wouldn't even have dared targeting!)
By way of a rule of thumb a good Shadow Domain should work from a fillertext file of at least 2-5 MB sanitized content to ensure variety and uniqueness of pages. This will normally entail downloading around 20-50 MB of unprocessed, raw HTML pages.
Step 3: Creating Phantom Pages - Based on your newly created fillertext file, you can now proceed with creating your phantom pages proper: simply cut and paste parts from your fillertext into your HTML page template and sprinkle it with your targeted search phrases (a maximum of two distinct search phrases per page has proven the most effective strategy) until you achieve your targeted keyword density.
Don't forget to add your search phrases in your page titles, and do crosslink your phantom pages as well as search engines notoriously dislike orphaned pages.
If you feel that the above seems like a daunting chore, you're right: depending on the type of site you are optimizing for, it may cost you quite a bit of effort to set up a decent, effective IP delivery infrastructure.
Thankfully, there's some software around which can help you save tons of time in the process.
Splitting and sorting the text is a task most word processors and the more powerful text editors can perform for you.
If you want to automate the process of keyword density generation, we recommend our own fantomas keyMixer(TM). More info on this program is available here: < http://fantomaster.com/fakeymixer0.html >
The fantomas keyMixer(TM) is part and parcel of both our fantomas Webmaster Suite(TM): < http://fantomaster.com/fawmsuite0.html > and our fantomas Super Suite(TM): < http://fantomaster.com/fasupersuite0.html >
And finally, if you want to automate the whole process from A to Z, we suggest you take a gander at our new flagship product, the fantomas shadowMaker(TM): This powerful server based application lets you generate an unlimited number of highly optimized Shadow Domains in a whiffy.
The fantomas shadowMaker(TM) offers the following selection of features (and then some): * Automatic selection of relevant URLs. * Whacking of relevant fillertext raw content. * Automatic sanitization and processing of raw content to create fully usable fillertext files. * Generation of an unlimited number of crosslinked phantom pages (10,000 pages per hour and more!) with predefined keyword density and page weight (both fully customizable). * Automatic submission of phantom pages to the search engines. * Automatic recognition of search engine spiders, working from the world's largest spider database, with human visitors being reliably redirected by search term to any target URL you care to define.
What's more, it is fully customizable - once you have installed it, you will never require any other cloaking software again.
Read all about it here: < http://fantomaster.com/fashadowmaker0.html >
Ralph Tegtmeier is the co-founder and principal of fantomaster.com GmbH (Belgium), < http://fantomaster.com/ >, a company specializing in webmasters software development, industrial-strength cloaking and search engine positioning services. He has been a web marketer since 1994 and is editor-in-chief of fantomNews, a free newsletter focusing on search engine optimization, available at: < http://fantomaster.com/fantomnews-sub.html > You can contact him at mailto:fneditor@fantomaster.com (c) copyright 2002 by fantomaster.com All rights reserved. Downloaded at: < http://fantomaster.com/ >
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