We’ve all felt the ill effects of spam. Whether it be that feeling in the pit of your stomach after munching down some of that pseudo-meat popular with Hawaiians, or all those emails promising a bigger penis bombarding your inbox, it sucks for the consumer.
But what exactly is search engine spam? There’s a grey line between search engine optimization practices that are deemed acceptable by some and considered search engine spam by others. It is not a clear as night or day issue. What one SEO may consider simply aggressive may be construed as shady by another.
Here’s how “search engine spamming” is defined by the contributors of Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_spammer):
Spamdexing or search engine spamming is the practice of deliberately and dishonestly modifying HTML pages to increase the chance of them being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a dishonest manner. Many designers of web pages try to get a good ranking in search engines and design their pages accordingly. Spamdexing refers exclusively to practices that are dishonest and mislead search and indexing programs to give a page a ranking it does not deserve.
In case you’re curious about particular search engine spamming techniques, I looked up some for you. Most of these techniques are old and can be detected by search engines. If you’re caught, your sites could be banned from their indexes. Use this as a checklist of what to avoid and NOT what to do. If you would like more information on a particular technique, I encourage you to do more in-depth research on each that interests you.
Search engine spamming techniques:
Keywords unrelated to site
Redirects
Keyword stuffing
Mirror/duplicate content
Tiny Text
Doorway pages
Link Farms
Cloaking
Keyword stacking
Gibberish
Hidden text
Domain Spam
Hidden links
Mini/micro-sites
Page Swapping (bait &switch)
Typo spam and cyber squatting
(Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3483601)
Mouse-activated redirects
Hidden table cells stuffed with keywords within <h1> tags
Links from contrived Websites
Publishing Empires
Wikis
Networked Blogs
Forums
Domain Spam
Duplicate Domains
Links inside No Script Tags
Javascript Redirects
Dynamic Real Time Page Generation
HTML invisible table cells
DHTML laying and Hidden text under layers
Humungous machine-generated Web sites
Link stuffing
Invisible text
Link Farms
(Source: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/search-engine-spam-techniques)
A technique commonly used currently:
Link Spam (spamming links on random blog comment pages and forums, often times utilizing a bot to do it automatically)
As I’ve mentioned in previous search articles, what search engines value most is relevant, legitimate content. It’s easy to try and cheat the system, often times the competition is so cutthroat that it forces you to play dirty. Especially in the affiliate space, where you are dealing with a large fragmented base of players, some looking to make a quick buck and some looking to build long lasting businesses.
I won’t make judgment on what techniques you decide to utilize. As I mentioned before, what may be considered simply being more aggressive, can from another point of view be seen as deceitful. Make sure however that you know what the major search engines consider spam and avoid those techniques. Play by their rules, but don’t be afraid to think outside-the-box and test out new techniques you think of or that you see others trying and having success with.
By the way, if you try any of these techniques and your sites get banned by the search engines, leaving you with no more income… fry thin slices of spam and eat it with rice and maybe a fried egg. It’s a good cheap eat.
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