Search engine spam is caused by websites and web pages that do not follow proper web development practices. Spamming search engines is known as Spamdexing. Spamming search engines can cause websites or web pages to be banned by search engines. Search engine spam, results in distorted, wrong and exaggerated search results. Many webmaster’s and user’s spam the search engines to improve their website rankings and to appear higher in the search results. Hence, this way search engines are manipulated by some people for their own personal gains. This is also known as “Gaming the Search Engine”.
History of Search Engine Spam
Many search engines in the mid 2000’s were party to this malpractice, by allowing people and organizations to commercialize their search results. Nowadays, search engines are more cautious and unforgiving to such spammers. This is due to their search results being overtly hyped, irregular and due to complaints by users of poor search results.
Ways of Spamming the Search Engines
Search engines are spammed in several ways by users. Some are as simple as repeating similar words that have high keyword value more than once in the web pages to appear more relevant to as complex as building doorway or web pages filled with false keywords to attract web page indexing.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing of meta tags and web pages is known as keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing falsely improves relevance of web pages or websites and also increases website rankings in search results.
Stuffing of meta tags is done to imply the web page contains keywords relevant to a search. But, in reality it may contain only Ponzi schemes or advertisements or other false messages.
Scraper Sites
These are content sites offering relevant content to information seekers, but in reality they are only content extractors that extract content from other websites. Though, these websites seem very relevant, the content obtained by them is without permission from the original websites.
Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are web pages setup by websites to increase link traffic to websites. They have very little relevant content, but they might be linked to parent websites to increase their page ranks. Doorway pages are seen as serious offence by search engines. And, is also classified as Black Hat SEO in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques.
Link Spamming
Link spamming refers to the process of posting website links on blogs, forums, and as comments on web page articles. It leads search engines to take into account such links as external links to websites, resulting in false or exaggerated website rankings.
Cloaking
Cloaking is a method by which link URLs are fashioned to look like normal web pages, but a different URL is served to search engines. This is done to generate false traffic and the actual content on the website is also different.
How do Search Engines Detect Spam?
Search engines use various methods to detect spam. These are fundamental to the way spam is handled by these search engines.
URL Properties
Spam URLs generally are known to be long as they are automatically generated using general alphabetical and numeric sequences. Search engine algorithms are tuned to detect and catch such automatic URL creators.
Linkage Properties
If links present on a page are out of sync with the content on the resultant page with respect to category, geography, or age group, it is construed as being spam. This is done by websites to increase their page relevance on search engines.
Content Properties
Search engines are known to detect keyword stuffing, increased keyword density, content in frames, and documents with similar content. They have programs that detect this kind of false content.
Why do People Spam the Search Engines?
Search engines are a major source of revenue to many businesses and individuals who need to advertise their wares on the search listings. By creating false website rankings, businesses or individuals are able to exhibit their products and services at no extra cost to them or their enterprises on search results.
This also enables them to be free themselves from other cost overheads such as hiring web content developers, copywriters, or programmers to create the excellent content and information rich websites that are required to achieve a search engines attention. Hence, greed is the major reason of search engine spam.
How do Search Engines Ban Spamming Websites?
Search engines are known to ban spamming websites from their indexes. This is done to keep their search results clean and error free. Many companies are known to hire unethical search engine optimization experts to improve their search engine listings. Search engines are always being tricked by these cons to increase their website rankings at their cost. Many of these companies and their agencies get banned by search engines. Once they are banned they would start again as a new outfit with a new website address, a new name, a new IP address and repeat the spam again. Search engines remove the names of such websites from their search listings and indexes. They receive no traffic from them and are banned for all time.
Safety Measures for Your Website
To ensure that your website does not end up being banned by search engines, certain key points should be remembered. Do not hire unethical website search engine optimizing agencies, be careful not to overstuff your meta keywords and content with similar words, double check the links appearing on your website to ensure they link to websites with similar content, do not try to build doorway pages or pages linking to your website but lacking in any relevant content, do not publish your link URLs wantonly on blogs, forums, or on other people’s web pages as comments to articles.
All these activities can increase your chances of staying safe from being blacklisted by the search engines. Good measures you can adopt to keep your website safe from being spam categorized is to submit your website regularly to search engines, using the nofollow tag for blogs on your website, building your website pages with proper names, keeping meta’s error free, and building clear, concise and rich content.
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