A: “Ghost Pages” come under many different names: stealth, cloaking, food pages, and more.
We actually prefer to term them “Phantom Pages” because that's exactly what they are: not “ghosts” as in “spirits of essentially dead people” but phantoms (or, arguably, “shadows”) of genuine html pages as normally expected.
The technique employed (usually based on Perl/CGI) consists of feeding the search engine spider a different (phantom) page from the one the normal user gets to see. As these do not have to be human-readable, you can optimize them no end to comply with SE requirements.
Note that this is no simple redirection trick (which would be penalized by many major SEs): the Perl program will actually READ the phantom page and feed it to the SE spider without redirection. It is only the human visitor's browser that gets redirected. Hence, the SE spider will never know the difference.
Obviously, it all depends on recognizing the SE spider when it comes. This is where many programs default: the bad ones will simply rely on the spider's UserAgent code, which, however, is dead easy to simulate or forge. (This is an important point in that your competitors might otherwise peek into your phantom page and steal your optimization code — quite a common practice, unfortunately.)
Good phantom or cloaking programs will identify spiders from their unique IP which cannot be forged (or, at least, not that easily — IP spoofing requires a lot of tech expertise and is actually illegal in many jurisdictions now). For this to work, you will need as comprehensive a SE spider database as possible.
Q:What are Doorway Pages, then?A: Doorway pages or, for short, “doorways”, are basically just what the term implies: gateways to the web site proper. (Actually, another common term for doorway pages is “gateway pages” or “gateways”.) Typically, a doorway may consist of a graphic and a welcome message plus a “Click here to enter the site” type of link. More sophisticated doorway pages will also contain a site map.
The trick behind doorways (and an explanation why they are so popular) lies in their source code: they will normally be optimized for web positioning in their headers, with meta tags containing keywords and page descriptions.
Frequently, a peek into the source code will also reveal some invisible text, though this is generally frowned upon by the search engine operators and by quite a few SEO professionals.
A more acceptable practice is the inclusion of invisible links in the doorway page — such links serve as an invitation to the search engine spider to crawl more individual pages of the submitted web site. As many search engines' ranking algorithms seem to favor pages not directly submitted by the webmaster but rather those “discovered” by their spiders or crawler during the process of exploring the submitted site, this procedure is widely deemed to be one of the most effective if you want your site to be “deep crawled”, as the technical term goes. Note that doorway pages should always be human readable and, hence, aesthetically fairly pleasing and easy to navigate.
Q: And Hallway Pages?A: Hallway Pages or “hallways” will typically constitute a list of site contents, each feature being hyperlinked to its appropriate page. While hallway pages will not be hidden to the human visitor by default, their prime focus lies in serving as “spider fodder”: similar to the invisible links mentioned above, they are offering individual hyperlinks for the search engine spiders to crawl.
Hallways will also typically be devoid of graphics content, though more often than not they will be endowed with appropriate meta tags to facilitate search engine indexing.
Sometimes, doorways are termed “bridge pages”, though technically speaking a hallway would offer the same functionality, so the distinction isn't always very clear.
Q: How are cloaked pages submitted?A: Cloaked pages are submitted to search engines just like any other web page, no special procedure required.
Q: How about changing stealth pages?A: If, by “changing stealth pages” you mean editing code or refreshing content, there is no difference in handling between stealth or phantom pages and regular web pages. If you are satisfied with your page's current SE ranking, you can edit or change the target file your regular visitors will be redirected to at your own discretion. If you want to see the spider food page proper re-indexed, simply submit it again to the SEs.
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