Search Engine Spam
Posted on | February 21, 2009 | No Comments
The first question most people ask is: “What, exactly, is search engine spam?”
To answer that question, we turned to the search engines who define spam as “pages created deliberately to trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant, or poor-quality search results.”
Search engines simply want to help searchers find high quality content related to their search, preferably linked to other high quality content. Therefore, to keep customer satisfaction high, the search engines take the following spam techniques very seriously, possibly banning forever websites that are caught:
Search Engine Spam Technique #1 – Hidden Text
Number 1 on the most wanted list for the Search Engine Spam Police is hidden text. Hiding irrelevant text under layers, pictures or by having it the same colour as your background can all be detected by the search engines. So don’t do this. They’ll catch you and banish your site from the search engine listings.
Search Engine Spam Technique #2 – Keyword Stuffing
Again, its all detectable by the search engines. So avoid overloading your webpage with lists of keywords or repeating your keyword over and over again in your meta tags. While its true that content is key to high rankings, the keyword here is “high quality content”.
Search Engine Spam Technique #3 – Doorway pages and Copied Content
Creating doorway pages or multiple domains that all have essentially the same content are also a no-no. So, not only shouldn’t you copy, but you also must protect your content from being copied. If you have a high ranking page, it wouldn’t surprise me if you were able to find your content being copied, word for word, on someone else’s web page. It’s in your interests to get a cease and desist order for this ASAP.
Search Engine Spam Technique #4 – Devious Redirects
This little trick was once used by porn sites to gain extra traffic, but the trick upset some parents and didn’t last long. A few months later we were greeted by the headline “FTC Steps In To Stop Spamming”. What was going on? Well, turns out some unscrupulous websites were created pages that contained lots of pages full of high quality content. Exactly what the search engines were looking for, right? However, after a second or two on this page, you would have been automatically redirected to an adult site. Can you say search engines and legal issues?
Search Engine Spam Technique #5 – Cybersquatting
Some search engine marketing articles will tell you that easy misspells of popular sites is an easy way to pick up extra traffic. And I suppose it is, but doesn’t this sound a little bit like the definition of spam we were given above. While owning a site such as goggle.com or yahhoo.com will bring you some extra traffic, it will punish you in the search engines.
Want to Report a Search Engine Spammer?
The truth is spam hurts all of us by making it difficult for the search engines to sort out the cream from the crap. Therefore, don’t feel like a snitch for reporting spam. In reality, you’re a hero. Report a Spam Result to Google today.
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