Search Engine Spam


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SEARCH ENGINE SPAM

Only the Ethical, Spamfree SEO Strategies Guarantee a Long Term Results, Qualified Traffic, Branding & Maximal ROI.

Any reputable search engine, and especially Google, being once again named the Global Brand of the Year and now serves 76% of US searches on Internet, has providing relevant results to the users as the top priority.

All search engines make periodical changes to their ranking algorithms to enhance the results they present to their searchers, and they don't reveal their ranking systems in details. Otherwise their results would be flooded with spam that would seriously endanger the quality of their results. Even if the search engine ranking systems are kept as the secret, people will eventually discover how to spam them successfully, therefore the algorithm must be altered occasionally.

Sergey Brin, Google cofounder, explained that PageRank is still very important part of Google's ranking system, but also that more than half a dozen new ranking technologies are tested each month, with about half of these being integrated into Google's PageRank algorithm. (Search Engine Strategies Conference, December 09, 2003, hosted by search guru Danny Sullivan)

Unethical SEO techniques are considered as spam by the search engines, and your website could be penalized for utilizing them. With search engine ranking systems constantly changing, spam tactics can never achieve long term results on the search engines. While these techniques might have worked in the past, with the next algorithm improvement they would be useless. In addition, your website might also be penalized for a set of keywords, or permanently banned from the search engines. Removing a penalty requires a human review of the penalized website, and quite a long time would be needed to get your website in search engines again.

Google penalize spam techniques, and specifically warns about most of them in their Webmaster's Guidelines, such as: hidden text, hidden links, keyword stuffing, artificial optimization, doorway pages, cloaking, deceptive redirects, multiple mirror sites, artificial interlinking, artificially cross-linking website networks, automated software utilization, etc. With the additional warning that "these quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here". There's also a Spam Report Page on Google where you can file a spam report, and help Google to create algorithms that can recognize and block future spam attempts.

Inktomi (powering MSN and soon to power Yahoo, etc.) also has Content Guidelines, showing that Inktomi defines search engine spam similar to Google, or any other relevant search engine.

The basic common sense principle would be NOT to utilize anything that you would not implement if the search engines didn't exist, or in short:
"Make pages for users, not for search engines." (Google Guidelines)

There is also an excellent White Paper: The Classification of Search Engine Spam, written by Alan Perkins, that defines search engine spam as:
"any attempt to deceive a search engine's relevancy algorithm",
and classifies it on the basis of on-the-page and off-the-page factors used by the search engine algorithms. There are two kinds of search engine spam according to this white paper:

"Content spam - Data within a part of a Web resource designed for humans (e.g. the <BODY> of a HTML document) where that data is designed only for search engines to see.

Meta spam - Data within a Web resource that describes that resource or another Web resource inaccurately or (when the data should be readable by humans) incoherently."

The paper also underline that links, as important off-the-page factors that influence search engine ranking algorithms, might also be used to deliver both content and meta spam. While reading the complete document is highly recommendable, using any of the discussed techniques is extremely dangerous.

Another White Paper: The Ethical SEO Guide, written by the same author, is also very useful, and especially the step-by-step guide on determining search engine spam:

"If the fact that search engines exist has no bearing on the way you write your Web pages, or have structured your Web site or your Web serving architecture, then you are not delivering spam.

If you are paying careful attention to the keywords that your prospects are likely to be searching for whilst writing your title, meta tags and body copy, that is not spam - you simply know how to write good well structured documents.

If you are trying to influence the appearance of your listing on a search engine (e.g. using a carefully crafted title, meta description, or opening sentence) then, as long as your intended listing accurately describes what visitors to the page will see, that is not spam. It's only fair that if your pages are adding value to a search engine index, you have some right to control how you are represented by that search engine. Your efforts will also help the search engine's users to determine whether to click through to your page. If, however, your intended listing does not accurately describe what visitors to the page will see, that is spam.

If you are delivering content to a search engine spider where the spider is not owned or paid for by you; and that content is designed to influence the search engine's relevancy calculations; and that content is not designed to be viewed (or is actively prevented from being viewed) by a human visitor from a location typical of the search engine's audience and using a browser of equivalent capabilities to the search engine spider, that is spam.

If none of the above applies to you, then you are probably not delivering spam (unless we forgot something!)."

There are many other useful articles on this topic, but the above two white papers explain the most often used and abused techniques. The only reason why you should learn more about them is not to use them by mistake, and to be able to determine if they were used on your website by some unethical SEOs.

On the other hand, off-the-page factors are important part of search engine ranking algorithms, therefore improving them could increase the chances of getting the top search engine placements, and attracting qualified search engine traffic. Link Building Search Engine Strategies >>

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SEARCH ENGINE SPAM

Only the Ethical, Spamfree SEO Strategies Guarantee a Long Term Results, Qualified Traffic, Branding & Maximal ROI.