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.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

15 Shades of SEO Spam:

1. Cloaking

Also known as “stealth”, cloaking is a technique that involves serving one set of information to known search engine spiders while displaying a different set of information on documents viewed by clients. While there are unique situations in which the use of cloaking might be considered ethical in the day-to-day practice of SEO, cloaking is never required. This is especially true after the Jagger algorithm update at Google, which uses document and link histories as important ranking factors.

2. IP Delivery

IP delivery is a simple form of cloaking in which a unique set of information is served based on the IP number the info-query originated from. IP addresses known to be search engine based are served one set of information while unrecognized IP addresses, (assumed to be live-visitors) are served another.

3. Leader Pages

Leader pages are a series of similar documents each designed to meet requirements of different search engine algorithms. This is one of the original SEO tricks dating back to the earliest days of search when there were almost a dozen leading search engines sorting less than a billion documents. It is considered SPAM by the major search engines as they see multiple incidents of what is virtually the same document. Aside from that, the technique is no longer practical as search engines consider a far wider range of factors than the arrangement or density of keywords found in unique documents.

4. Mini-Site networks

Designed to exploit a critical vulnerability in early versions of Google’s PageRank algorithm, mini-site networks were very much like leader pages except they tended to be much bigger. The establishment of a mini-site network involved the creation of several topic or product related sites all linking back to a central sales site. Each mini-site would have its own keyword enriched URL and be designed to meet specific requirements of each major search engine. Often they could be enlarged by adding information from leader pages. By weaving webs of links between mini-sites, an artificial link-density was created that could heavily influence Google’s perception of the importance of the main site.

In the summer of 2004, Google penalized several prominent SEO and SEM firms for using this technique by banning their entire client lists.

5. Link Farms

Link farms emerged as free-for-all link depositories when webmasters learned how heavily incoming links influenced Google. Google, in turn, quickly devalued and eventually eliminated the PR value it assigned to pages with an inordinate collection or number of links. Nevertheless, link farms persist as uninformed webmasters and unethical SEO firms continue to use them.

6. Blog and/or Forum Spam

Blogs and forums are amazing and essential communication technologies, both of which are used heavily in the daily conduct of our business. As with other Internet based media, blogs and forum posts are easily and often proliferated. In some cases, blogs and certain forums also have established high PR values for their documents. These two factors make them targets of unethical SEOs looking for high-PR links back to their websites or those of their clients. Google in particular has clamped down on Blog and Forum abuse.

7. Keyword Stuffing

At one time, search engines were limited to sorting and ranking sites based on the number of keywords found on those documents. That limitation led webmasters to put keywords everywhere they possibly could. When Google emerged and incoming links became a factor, some even went as far as using keyword stuffing of anchor text.

The most common continuing example of keyword stuffing can be found near the bottom of far too many sites in circulation.

8. 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’.

9. Useless Meta Tags

Most meta tags are absolutely useless. The unethical part is that some SEO firms actually charge for the creation and insertion of meta tags. In some cases, there seems to be a meta tag for virtually every possible factor but for the most part are not considered by search spiders.

10. Misuse of Directories

Directories, unlike other search indexes, tend to be sorted by human hands. Search engines traditionally gave links from directories a bit of extra weight by considering them links from trusted authorities. A practice of spamming directories emerged as some SEOs and webmasters hunted for valuable links to improve their rankings. Search engines have since tended to devalue links from most directories. Some SEOs continue to charge directory submission fees.

11. Hidden Tags

There are a number of different sorts of tags used by search browsers or website designers to perform a variety of functions such as; comment tags, style tags, alt tags, noframes tags, and http-equiv tags. For example, the “alt tag” is used by site-readers for the blind to describe visual images. Inserting keywords into these tags was a technique used by a number SEOs in previous years. Though some continue to improperly use these tags, the practice overall appears to be receding.

12. Organic Site Submissions

One of the most unethical things a service-based business can do is to charge clients for a service they don’t really need. Charging for, or even claiming submissions to the major search engines are an example. Search engine spiders are so advanced they no longer require site submission to find information. Search engine spiders find new documents by following links. Site submission services or SEO firms that charge clients a single penny for submission to Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask Jeeves, are radically and unethically overcharging those clients.

13. Email Spam

Placing a URL inside a “call-to-action” email continues to be a widely used of search marketing spam. With the advent of desktop search appliances, email spam has actually increased.

14. Redirect Spam

There are several ways to use the redirect function to fool a search engine or even hijack traffic destined for another website! Whether the method used is a 301, a 302, a 402, a meta refresh or a java-script, the end result is search engine spam.

15. Misuse of Web 2.0 Formats (i.e. Wiki, social networking and social tagging)

An emerging form of SEO spam is found in the misuse of user-input media formats such as Wikipedia. Like blog comment spamming, the instant live-to-web nature of Web 2.0 formats provide an open range for SEO spam technicians. Many of these exploits might even find short-term success though it is only a matter of time before measures are taken to devalue the efforts.

16. 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 on line. 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’.

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.

17. Mirror sites

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.