Date First Published: 2nd September 2022
Topic: Web Design & Development
Subtopic: SEO
Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions
Difficulty: MediumDifficulty Level: 5/10
Learn more about what page swapping is in this article.
Page swapping is a black hat SEO technique that involves completely changing a page after it has been ranked and indexed by search engines in order to manipulate the search engine ranking for certain keywords in the SERP page. Website owners will use certain content to rank high and once satisfied with the ranking, they will swap the page content with something else that won't rank as high in the hope that search engine bots won't discover that the content has changed.
The issue with page swapping is that searchers will look for results relevant to their search query, click on the result, and then find that the page is irrelevant to what they were searching for. Eventually, search engine bots will return to the page, notice that it has been changed, and then reposition the page in the SERP page, so this is a short-term black hat SEO technique that only works for a limited period of time.
Page swapping deceives users as the description and title are completely different to what the page is actually about. This gives a bad user experience and increases the bounce rate as users will leave the website if they did not find what they were looking for. Page swapping is similar to a doorway page. However, instead of creating keyword-stuffed pages that provide little value for users or forcibly redirecting the user to a different page using JavaScript, page swapping involves swapping out text on the page. Doorway pages may be stuffed with keywords and may repeat content from other pages to trick search engines into thinking that there is good quality content.
Page swapping is similar to doorway pages and is against the webmaster guidelines of most search engines, such as Google and can result in websites getting penalised. As a result, they will appear lower in the index or even be completely removed. Like cloaking, it is definitely a black hat SEO technique as it involves someone doing something deceptive or misleading.
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