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Spam:
Not the Search Engine Spiders Favorite Lunchmeat!
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We are constantly reminded of spam in regards to the Internet. With all those unwanted junk emails that accumulate into your InBox and the annoying pop-up ads that invade your privacy as you surf the Internet -- spam is everywhere. Over the last couple years, spam has made its emergence in the search engine optimization arena as well. In an attempt to improve their search engine rankings, webmasters and web site owners try to deceive the search engines into thinking their site is more important than it really is. But, their feeble attempts usually backfire. Search engines won't tolerate unethical search engine optimization practices and will penalize sites that adopt such tactics. We've listed the more commonly known deceptive spam tactics to further clarify what NOT to do during the search engine optimization process. • Cloaking: Cloaking is the unethical search engine optimization practice of feeding search engine spiders one page and serving a different page to users based on certain qualities related to them, such as their IP address. • Code swapping: With this tactic, the code for a highly ranked page is swapped for that of a page with lesser page rank. The process repeats itself until all pages have high ranking, or until the search engine penalizes them. • Doorway pages: These pages are designed to drive traffic into a site under specific keywords through another domain name. • Invisible text: In an attempt to hide keywords -- rather than place them strategically throughout their site's content -- some webmasters will use text that is the same color as the background settings of the web page. In that respect, the user wouldn't see this blatant repetition of keywords, but a search engine spider would. • Irrelevant keywords: Imagine typing "George W. Bush" into a search engine and arriving at a Web site for discount cellular phones. By flooding your content and/or meta tags with popular, frequently searched for keywords that have nothing to do with your site, you aren't really doing yourself any favors. Once a user arrives at your site and discovers it has nothing to do with what they were searching for, they will inevitably leave. • Keyword "stuffing": Similar to the invisible text tactic, another unethical way to increase the number of keywords on a page is to repeat (or stuff) your selected keywords at the bottom of the page in a very small font. •
Link farms: In an attempt to increase link popularity, many
webmasters succumb to link farms. A link farm is a network of
Web sites that are cross-linked with each other. Basically,
it is a very quick (and also very risky) way to get tons of
reciprocal links added to your site. • Mirror sites: Mirror sites are exact duplications of an original site, but are designed specifically to get high ranking under many keywords. • Over-submitting: Never flood the search engines with submissions. They all have submission requirements, and if you don't follow through with their guidelines, you could face a penalty. We recommend submitting a maximum of five pages per day for each search engine. An exception would be AltaVista, where we recommend only one submission per day. • Redirects: In many cases, redirects are legitimate, especially in cases where a site is being reorganized. However, unscrupulous webmasters can turn a legitimate redirect into an unethical search engine optimization technique. An illegitimate redirect is used to move a human from a page that has been designed for a search engine spider to see to a page designed for human viewing. But, what the search engine spider actually sees is a page loaded with spam. Once
again, these are unethical search engine optimization practices
that should never be attempted under any circumstance. High
search engine ranking can be achieved, but it takes time. With
proper search engine optimization, it may take anywhere from
30-60 days for a Web site to achieve high ranking due to the
time it takes for spiders to correctly index your site.
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