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Heaven's Gate Cult Were Keyword Spammers
I read an article today that the Heaven’s Gate website was still active and unchanged after 15 years.
I don’t know if you remember but Heaven’s Gate was a UFO cult led by the very strange Marshall Applewhite who believed that Earth was going to be “recycled” and the human race destroyed. The only way to survive the coming Armageddon would be to hitch a ride on a space ship trailing behind the Hale-Bopp comet and thereby get to the “Next Level”. In order to do so they had to leave their earthly bodies behind.
Or something like that.
One of the things the cult did to earn a living prior to their March 1997 mass suicide was to create websites. The source code of old ghost sites like this one represent a snapshot of how websites used to be constructed back in the frontier days of the web so, just for goofs, I decided to take a look.
It turns out that if you look at the heavensgate.com source code you’ll discover that they were not just ufo cultists and website developers, but also keyword spammers!
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<font size="0" color="#000000">Heaven's Gate
Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate
Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo
space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien
space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien
extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial
extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial
extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial
extraterrestrial extraterrestrial misinformation misinformation
misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation
misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation
freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom
freedom freedom freedom second coming second coming second coming second
coming second coming second coming second coming second coming second
coming second coming angels angels angels angels angels angels angels
angels angels angels end end times times end times end times end times end
times end times end times end times end times end times </font size>
<font size="0" color="#000000">Key Words: (for search engines) 144,000,
Abductees, Agnostic, Alien, Allah, Alternative, Angels, Antichrist,
Apocalypse, Armageddon, Ascension, Atheist, Awakening, Away Team, Beyond
Human, Blasphemy, Boddhisattva, Book of Revelation, Buddha, Channeling,
Children of God, Christ, Christ's Teachings, Consciousness, Contactees,
Corruption, Creation, Death, Discarnate, Discarnates, Disciple, Disciples,
Disinformation, Dying, Ecumenical, End of the Age, End of the World,
Eternal Life, Eunuch, Evolution, Evolutionary, Extraterrestrial, Freedom,
Fulfilling Prophecy, Genderless, Glorified Body, God, God's Children, God's
Chosen, God's Heaven, God's Laws, God's Son, Guru, Harvest Time, He's Back,
Heaven, Heaven's Gate, Heavenly Kingdom, Higher Consciousness, His Church,
Human Metamorphosis, Human Spirit, Implant, Incarnation, Interfaith, Jesus,
Jesus' Return, Jesus' Teaching, Kingdom of God, Kingdom of Heaven, Krishna
Consciousness, Lamb of God, Last Days, Level Above Human, Life After Death,
Luciferian, Luciferians, Meditation, Members of the Next Level, Messiah,
Metamorphosis, Metaphysical, Millennium, Misinformation, Mothership, Mystic,
Next Level, Non Perishable, Non Temporal, Older Member, Our Lords Return,
Out of Body Experience, Overcomers, Overcoming, Past Lives, Prophecy,
Prophecy Fulfillment, Rapture, Reactive Mind, Recycling the Planet,
Reincarnation, Religion, Resurrection, Revelations, Saved, Second Coming,
Soul, Space Alien, Spacecraft, Spirit, Spirit Filled, Spirit Guide,
Spiritual, Spiritual Awakening, Star People, Super Natural, Telepathy,
The Remnant, The Two, Theosophy, Ti and Do, Truth, Two Witnesses, UFO,
Virginity, Walk-ins, Yahweh, Yeshua, Yoda, Yoga,</font size>
</center>
</body></html>This little bit of code I pulled from the bottom of the index page tells it all - they were an early adopter of black-hat SEO techniques.
Back in the early days of search engines, webmasters could put invisible text on their website (that is, text that’s the same color as the background so that humans wouldn’t see it, but search engine spiders could).
They also repeated many keywords over and over again because the primitive, old search algorithms would often use keyword frequency as a major factor in calculating relevancy for ranking purposes.
You can see that Heaven's Gate was really trying hard to rank for things like “ufo”, “extraterrestrial”, “freedom”, “second coming”, "space alien", "end times", “angels”, and "misinformation".
If only ranking well in search was still that easy…
We at Green Crescent wish them well on their journey and hope they found the Next Level.