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.
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