Shadow domain
In the field of search engine optimization (SEO), a shadow domain is understood to be a domain that leads to another website using a misleading redirect . The actual optimization is carried out on the shadow domain. Shadow domains violate search engine guidelines . Using them can result in both domains being removed from the index .
The technology is related to bridging pages , but does not work with JavaScript - or Meta-Tag - but with regular HTTP redirects . In addition, a shadow domain is always a separate domain, while bridging pages are often on the same domain as the target page.
techniques
First, the shadow domain is camouflaged as a regular web presence from the search engine's web crawlers . In order to achieve the best possible evaluation of the domain in the search engines, many constantly changing tricks of search engine spamming are used. Among other things, the shadow domain is filled with numerous individual pages with normal appearing but often meaningless text in which the desired search terms occur statistically optimally distributed, many such shadow domains are closely linked with each other by hyperlinks , cloaking is used , etc. To improve the target website, a redirect to this is set up using a rewrite engine or similar server-side technology. At this point, the target domain “inherits” part of the popularity of the shadow domain and appears better positioned in the search results of the search engines for a short time. However, this effect is - if at all - only of very short duration, since the use of shadow domains is recognized by all major search engines and punished accordingly after a short time.
If the shadow domain does not belong to the website operator to whose presence you are redirected, but to the search engine optimizer, there is a risk that the latter will redirect the shadow domain to another website when the contract is terminated, possibly also to the competition.