Written by:
2011/04/27 11:10 AM 

I’m sure we have all been affected by spam. Spam emails being the most common. Then there is the rising practice of spam commenting. But did you know that there is also SEO spam.

What is SEO spam?

In the search engine world, spam is defined as the manipulation of a web page to give it an artificial boost in the search engine rankings.

Other terms that might fall under this category is Black Hat SEO and Spamdexing

• Black Hat SEO - Black Hat SEO refers to the use of aggressive SEO strategies, techniques and tactics that focus only on search engines and not a human audience, and usually does not obey search engines rules
• Spamdexing - A word derived from “spam” and “indexing,” refers to the practice of search engine spamming. Spamdexing is the practice of creating websites in the hope that they will be illegitimately indexed with a high position in the search engines.

SEO Spam is basically creating websites or pages that have little value to the human being, but try to manipulate the search engine rankings.

SEO Spam is any unethical tactic or business practice that tries to manipulate search engine results and rankings.

Bad SEO practices

Here is a list of some bad SEO practices. If you or your SEO company is in anyway involved or even considering these, then leave. Find another SEO company.

1. Cloaking – Also known as stealth. A practice of serving one set of pages to search engines and another set of pages to real live users.
2. Leader pages – These are many similar documents, each targeted to meet requirements of different search engine algorithms. Essentially they are duplicate pages
3. Transparent links – These are links in pages that users cannot see because they are the same colour as the background.
4. Link punctuation – These are punctuations that carry links. Difficult for users to see or notice. Check the point at the end of this line.
5. Hidden links - These links are on the page but are hidden behind elements like graphics. They don't turn the graphic into a hyperlink, but a search engine can find them and follow them, even when people can't.
6. Keyword stuffing - Loading the content or the meta tags of a web site with keywords that are repeated over and over.
7. Organic Site Submissions - Charging for, or even claiming submissions to the major search engines. Search engine spiders are so advanced they no longer require site submission to find information
8. Redirect spam – This is the art of redirecting a user to a different page after landing on said page. 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.
9. Doorway pages - These pages are designed specifically to draw search crawlers but are essentially useless to visitors.
10. Scraper sites: These are web sites that "scrape," or copy their content from other pages on the Web. Scraper sites are not original and usually direct visitors to another site that's less relevant to their search terms.
11. Machine-generated pages - These are web pages put together by a program that grabs the content from another web page or web pages. They might also create content using a random algorithm.
12. Link farms – Link farms are pages and or sites that have an extremely high and un-natural amount of links. These links are highly devalued by the search engines.
13. Useless Meta Tags – Most meta tags are completely useless now days. But unethical SEO’s are still charging and wowing their clients with meta tags.

Don’t use SEO spam

• If it gives you a bad feeling, or sounds wrong, or becomes too complicated to understand, then I would avoid it and any company that leans towards those practices.
• Don't make your web site or web page appear to be something that it's not. Don’t use or trust anyone that says a certain practice is acceptable when you suspect it is not.
• The best practice is good web site design.
• The best SEO is natural organic web site content written for your readers and not for the search engines.

Have you noticed an increase in SEO Spam? Have you been caught out by unethical SEO’s who engage in some of these practices? Have I missed out on any spam or black hat techniques that you consider to be important to know about?

Please let us know in the comments below.

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