SEO Spam Search Engine Spamming also known as Spamdexing (spamming and indexing) is the practice of deliberately manipulating web pages to obtain high search engine rankings. Spamdexing is used to mislead search engines indexing program and to gain ranking position which they do not deserve.The spam tactics mentioned below could either block search engine robots form crawling your site properly or get your site penalized in certain search engines/directories. Make sure you are well aware of these tactics before designing or optimising your website.

10 Search Engine Spam tactics known -

Hidden Keywords

Hidden keyword also known as invisible text is the most common form of spam practised on websites. Hidden text or content will not be seen by human visitors and are only meant for the search engines spiders. The purpose of using hidden text is to increase the keyword density of the webpage and also to trick the search engines into indexing the text on the page. Hidden texts are used through HTML format and also using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword Stuffing is implemented by adding block of keywords/keyphrases onto the webpage. Keyword stuffing is practised to increase the density of targeted keywords, thereby tricking the search engine robots into considering the page to be more relevant for the search phrase.

Use of Unrelated Keywords

Unrelated keywords is the practice of using keywords on the webpage which are not related to sites content. This method is followed to trick a few people searching for such words into clicking at their sites link.

Hidden Links Hidden links are used to increase the link popularity of the site. These links are hidden from the reach of visitors and are used to fool the search engines. They are usually in the form of small hyperlinked dots.

Redirects

Redirection is the process of taking the user to another page without his or her intervention by using META refresh tags, CGI scripts, Java, JavaScript, Server side redirects or server side techniques.

Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are low quality web pages that contain very little content, stuffed with targeted keywords and keyphrases. Doorway pages are designed to rank highly within the search results. A doorway page will generally have “click here to enter” in the middle of it.

Unreadable Tiny Text

Tiny text spam consists of placing keywords and phrases in the tiniest text imaginable all over site/webpage. Most people can’t see them, but spiders can and will ban such sites eventually.

Link Farms

Link farms are webpages created solely for search engine ranking purpose that consist of long list of unrelated weblinks on page.

These type of pages/sites are penalised by most search engines.

Cloaking

Cloaking is the practice of dynamically generating keyword rich content to the search engine robots, while providing different content to the actual visitors. By cloaking the user will not be able to see the code of the page shown to the search engines. Usually, the cloaking software creates hundreds of web pages that are optimized for a special search term so that search engine spiders get the impression that the website contains a lot of relevant information about a special topic.

Mirror Sites

Mirror sites are identical sites hosted on different domains/website address. By mirroring sites one can build hundreds of duplicate pages with entirely different urls. Intention of adopting mirror sites is to quickly populate your sites pages and also to increase inbound links.

Most Search Engines do not appreciate duplication of sites, but some of them are vulnerable to such technique as yet.

What is basic SEO and how does one go about it?

SEO is the short way to say Search Engine Optimization. It is the practice of trying to get better rankings in Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Those three are known as the ‘big three’ because nearly all searchers use one of them, so it is the most profitable for you to try to optimize for them. Americans conducted 7.4 billion searches online in May, up 12 percent from April. Google Sites registered the most search queries performed with 3.3 billion, followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.1 billion), MSN-Microsoft (963 million) - Comscore

Search engines take into account many things in your website, optimizing those is called on-page optimization, everything that isn’t your website is off-page optimization. Now, while the exact ranking formulae are secret, this is what is widely believed as ’simple SEO’.

First, we want to improve on-page optimization. So we have to pick keywords. There are a variety of tools you can search for which will give you lists of keywords that are usable.

Now you have your keywords. So you now have to see what the top 10 people are doing for them (warning: basic html and math needed ahead). Go to the top person on the most important keyword you have, on google. As an example, we’ll use the keywords ‘free downloads’, and I’ll do the math with you.

The number one website is download.com, so let’s analyze this top website.

Keyword density is the measure of how many times a keyword appears compared to the rest of the text in that area. The areas include: title, meta keywords, meta description, plain content (text), h1, h2, h3, bold, italics, underlined and domain name.

Let’s do some of the math for download.com… Their title is: “Reviews and free downloads at download.com” First we ignore any ‘common’ word, like ‘and, the, at’ etc. So we have: “Reviews free downloads download.com” So, ‘free downloads’ takes up 14 characters out of 35, or 40%. In the meta description tag, it’s 14/272 = 5.14%, so go on and on through the list, keeping it in an excel. After you’ve done the top 10 in google, go to the top 10 in yahoo and msn, ignoring the repeats and do it again. Now, take the average. For the title, let’s say my average was 15%. I wanna try to have a percentage close to that. Too much, and I might get penalized, too little and It wont help.

That’s the basic on-site SEO. Matching keyword density on the site. Off-site seo is everything that is not on your site, mainly getting links for the beginner. The kind of links you want are links from a relevant website that has few other links to other sites. Ways to get these: Submit to directories and reciprocal linking. Submit your site to directories. You can find many lists of them on google. Reciprocal linking is trading links, or in effect, ‘I’ll link to you if you link to me’. The best way to get one is to go to a person who’s site is close in topic with yours, find their email and send a personal one.

_______________ Dear (contact info, or Webmaster) I was looking at your site and I really liked (thing on their site) about it. (comment about site). I have placed a link to you at (URL of link you place to them) and would appreciate if you’d link back.

Regards, (name) (your site url) _______________ Yes, you have to do this manually, yes, it will help you, and yes, you have to link first. You’re the one asking for a link, so you have to show them you mean it.

Do that for all the top websites in your keywords, and keep doing it. The more you get links, the higher you’ll be in the rankings. You can find the number your competitors have by going to MSN search and typing in ‘Link:download.com’ for my example. It showed that there were 692,811 links to download.com… Better get to work.