What is Search Engine Spam?
"Could you do the egg bacon spam and sausage without the
spam then?" - Monty
Python
A number of people love the lunch meat Spam®, (though
we’re
not certain why), but everybody hates email spam. It wastes our time
and resources and is generally a frustration we don’t need. Search
engines hate spam just as much.
What is search engine spam?
Search engine spam is any attempt by web site designers
to manipulate a search engine's relevancy algorithm. Or, in layman’s
terms, inserting misleading key words or phrases to trick the search
engine into selecting
a site that is not really what the searcher is looking for.
What is not spam?
Anything that would be on
the site whether search engines existed or not.
Search engine optimizers (SEO) like ourselves have
to tread a fine line between legitimate activities that will raise a
site's ranking, and deliberate
manipulation or spamming that will get the site banned from the major
search engines. As the proprietor of a web site, you need to be able
to
trust your SEO to be ethical and honest, to provide advice that will
raise your sites profile will avoiding spamming the search engines.
Some Spamming Techniques
Elixir Systems strictly avoids current “vogue” search
engine optimizations that we consider dishonest and likely to get a page
banned. We list them here so that if another SEO company suggests using
them, you will know to question their ethics.
- Agent Based Spam , Cloaking and IP
Cloaking - all names for
detecting who is requesting the page and serving one page to a search
engine
and
another
to a surfer.
Various methods and services are available that can do this for you,
such as IP Cloaking, but the search engines frown on pages deliberately
designed for them and can ban you for it.
- Content Spam – writing your keywords
in the text of the document even though they make no sense. For “real
estate,” spam would be considered “real estate, real estate,
real estate” repeated within the text of the document for no
reason.
- Meta Spam – where
parts of the page that are generally not visible have invalid, misleading
or otherwise incorrect
information inserted.
- Hidden Text or Links – some
search engines penalize pages that use certain techniques intended
to hide
text or hyperlinks from the end user while making them visible to the
search engine. One common tactic to hide a link is to use a tiny, 1-pixel
image that contains a link, another is to use the same color foreground
and background for text. Either technique will get your site banned
- Link Farms – a network of pages on various
web sites cross-linked to each other for the sole reason of improving
the site’s search engine ranking.
- Redirects – where
one page in a site automatically sends a user to a separate page
in the site. These redirects
have legitimate uses such as when a site is reorganized and the user
needs to be redirected to the new page. However redirects have been
abused in the past by people keyword stuffing a page the search engine
sees but the user effectively doesn't see because they're automatically
redirected to a new page.
If you get your site banned, it can be difficult to get it reinstated.
At Elixir Systems we pride
ourselves on the ethical way we run our company and we avoid spamming
techniques at all times.
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