SEO Spam - what to avoid!

There are many ways people try to attract traffic from search engines. Some aggressive methods that go too far are collectively known by a term - "spam". In many cases it's a very fine line with the search engines on what can benefit a site's rankings and what the engines will consider to be unethical spam. Such an attempt can not only damage the targeted page, but the site (and its branding) as a whole.

More and more search engines are cracking down on what they consider spamming techniques used to gain top rankings. Legitimate Webmasters must be careful not to get put in the same category as the small minority of spammers who submit dozens of pages and present off-topic material in irrelevant categories. Also, techniques that weren't considered spamming several months or a year ago are now "red flag" areas that the engines monitor closely.

Some of the more common types of spamming would include:

1) Hidden Text & Tiny Text - Some sites have tried to increase their keyword density (and hence their rankings), by adding more text on their page. However, because it is not relevant to the page's design, one common way is to place the same colour text as the background and to do so at the bottom of the page (below the footer menu), so that only the search engine sees it. This is to be avoided, and has gotten many sites removed from engines.

Another method of hiding stuffing was to use tiny text, or placing words in an extremely small font size. Because of this, some search engines may reject pages that make heavy use of small font sizes (under 6pt).

Some examples of "tiny text" in the past included sites that had pages of content in a 1pt font, so that no one could actually see it lurking on the page. As this has been one of the more effectively patrolled aspects of search engine spam, few examples of this exist anymore. However some sites will alter the CSS so that the user sees a tiny font but engines see a normal one.

Another variation is pixel images that link to pages strictly created for SEO.

2) Keyword Stuffing - This technique consists of repeating keyword(s) over and over in text -- usually at the top of the page and/or at the bottom of the page in very small letters or headline. In addition, "spamdexing" can also be found in Meta and Title tags.

Search engines are very wise to keyword stuffing. Today's search engine spiders understand basic linguistics and have an idea about proper sentence structure. Some of them even analyze pages to determine if the frequency of a word seems out of proportion to normal, "relevant" documents. This helps them combat more sophisticated forms of stuffing.

3) Duplicate Content - Avoid sites that put the same (or very similar templates of the same) content on many pages. For example, they may have a page titled for each region, but the actual page text content is exactly the same.

A variation of this is from sites that would duplicate other sites content (also known as "scraper sites"), which also violates copyrighting standards.

4) Doorway Pages - Avoid creating pages just for the use of Search Optimization. A popular technique a few years back was to create "entry pages" where a site would build loads of keyword dense pages about each targeted keyword outside the main structure of the site. A regular user of the website would never come across this keyword laden page, but the search engines would index it well in the short term. Since doorway pages contain redundant content, search engines eliminate them once they are detected; however more recently they now often remove the whole site as a penalty.

5) Cloaking - This is the process of delivering a different page to search engines than users see. Since cloaking often serves irrelevant content, and low-quality pages, search engines commonly ban the IP address of the cloaked content. Again, any site doing this can risk being completely removed off the results.

6) Link Farms - Within the many billions of sites indexed by the major search engines, some of them are strictly created to try and influence a part of Google's algorithm that values a site's link strength. Many companies have created auto-generated content where multiple sites link to each other, commonly called free-for-all (FFA) Web sites. One telling characteristic of this technique - is having hundreds of "directory sites" that all either look very similar (same site, different domain or background colour) and / or - all of the sites happen to be on the same IP address.

A variation of these are known as "Link Exchanges" or "Reciprocal Link Directories" where a site will put a link to your site, but only if you put a link to theirs. This can be relevant, if the two sites have some sort of relation to each other, but the usual culprits are sites with thousands of links pointing to sites that are not really of any particular interest.

7) Link buying networks - Lastly, a more recent trend is link networks, which consist of brokers organizing your site to scatter your keyword focused link across hundreds of other websites in their network of member sites. Many of these so called member sites are selling links in order to make money (such as blog sites or small businesses), and so it often comes off as a means of advertising. However, many of these sites lack meaningful content, or relevance. For example, many UK car insurance sites buy links on US blogs about cars, which while consisting of similar keyword relevance (such as "cars"), has no real audience relevance (US consumers would have no use for a UK insurance policy).

While these are the more common types of spamming, there unfortunately is no official "rule book" that states what all search engines consider to be spamming. Each engine defines its own rules. Top level guidelines to what search engines consider legitimate appear in the following places.

Google's webmaster Guidelines can be seen at -
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

You can also raise a spam report on Google and Google Webmasters, the latter being more prone to being followed up on, as it is not anonymous.

Yahoo's at -
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html

MSN at -
http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm

In today's search engine climate, it's best to stay clear of any practice that could potentially lead to trouble. While it is true that some people get away with deploying some of these techniques below, eSM strongly advise to resist the temptation as the solution is usually temporary at best and the consequences for being caught can result in a site being removed from the results entirely (including for ones own brand term).

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