Search engine spam

[cyriac]

Most of us think of spam as junk email. Search engine spam is different. Search engine spam is any means of manipulating search engine spiders to artificially boost a website's page rank or positioning on search engine results pages. In other words, search engine spam is any tactic employed by site owners to fool search engine spiders. Not a good idea.

What is and isn't spam?

Every search engine has its own definition of what constitutes search engine spam. So, in essence, spam is whatever search engine geeks say it is. However, there's an obvious, widespread consensus among search engine professionals as to what constitutes spam. Further, search engine information pages provide clear guidelines for what they consider acceptable and unacceptable practices.

Three of the most common search engine spam tactics are hidden text, doorway pages and mirror sites. Let's look at each one

Hidden text

Hidden text, sometimes called search spam, is text that's invisible to visitors but readable to search engine spiders. Drop a block of white text on a white background and it's completely invisible to human eyeballs but easily readable by spiders.
Hidden text is usually just a slew of keywords, variations on keywords and other information of interest to search engine spiders but not very helpful to humans. So, when you visit the site, you see nothing but white space. Spiders scan line after line of keywords which may well artificially boost the site's page prank.

Another ruse employed by many SEO rookies is to hide text in the HTML code that supports the site skin. This is another wrong-headed ploy that will get your new site slammed faster than you can say ‘Welcome’.

Doorway pages
Doorway pages and/or splash screens are nothing more than full-sized advertisements. Search engines have been able to detect these pages for almost 10 years but site owners and unknowing webmasters still employ this subterfuge
A doorway page or splash screen is a stand-alone page in front of the main site. It's purpose? To land high in search engine results pages and get you to click on the doorway page link. So, let's say you're shopping for surf boards online. So you Google surfboards, scroll down a few links and see what appears to be the perfect site for what you're looking for. You click the link and you're taken to a garbage page with lots of adverts, usually some hidden text and the simple direction, ‘For surfboards, click here’. You, web surfer, have been hoodwinked.

Doorway pages have one purpose - to drive traffic to a site. They don't provide information, product listings or contact information. They're like full-screen banner ads that you have to pass through to get to the actual site you're looking for. Search engines hate doorway pages because they diminish the quality of their results and annoy their users.

So, how do you distinguish between a doorway page and a very active homepage? Simple. The homepage appears on the site map and can be accessed from other pages within the site. Not so with a doorway page. It's strictly one-way - in! You can't access a doorway page from the interior of the site. You can only access it by clicking on the search engine results link again.

Here's what Google has to say about doorway pages right on the Google Quality Guidelines page: ‘Avoid doorway pages created just for search engines’. Simple advice. Good advice.

Mirror sites

Mirror sites, at first glance, don't appear to be a deceitful tactic. A mirror site is simply a duplicate site that uses different keywords and HTML descriptor tags. So, let's say you sell sporting goods online. You might have one site with football-related keywords, the same site, perhaps with a different web host, with baseball-related keywords and another mirror (duplicate) site with nothing but keywords related to scuba diving. Seems like a reasonable approach to driving traffic with a variety of sports interests.

Search engines take a very dim view of duplicate content cluttering up their results pages. The reason? Because this would allow any site to have an infinite number of listings on search results pages, simply by changing keywords in site text and HTML tags. And that would most certainly diminish the quality of results pages.
Search engine spam - don't do it!

You may get away with deceptive practices for a while. Maybe even a month or two. But eventually you'll be found out and the consequences could be lethal to your online enterprise.

Google, Yahoo! and the other big search engines will ban a site that employs illicit black- or grey-hat tactics. In the case of mirror sites, one of them will certainly be banned from search engine indexing. Perhaps all your mirror sites will be banned.

So, if you use mirror sites, take down all but your main site. If you employ mirror pages within your site, lose them. If you've got three doorway pages in front of your site, each employing a different set of keywords, eliminate all of them.

And, if your site is deep in hidden text, written for search engine spiders and not for human consumption, lose the invisible spider text.

A final word of caution

If you’re new to the world of online and you’re unfamiliar with the dos and don’ts of SEO, visit each search engine and carefully read their statements of acceptable practices. This is essential because what you view as a harmless marketing ploy may be viewed by a search engine as deceitful


There are plenty of ways to get your site noticed and properly indexed without resorting to SEO spam. If you can do it yourself, perfect. If you aren't sure of what you're doing, even a completely innocent mistake can cost you. You'll drop in page rank, your site will be mis-indexed or under-indexed and you could be banned altogether.

[Steve Smith]

Spam is usually associated with email and for a few folks a pork-based meat cube in a can. We all agree that email spam is a bad thing. And email programs around the world are taking more and more steps every day to exclude spam.