Spam is simply bad for health! The word conjures up images of everything dark, deceptive and infectious; enough to give you endless sleepless nights till you get a solution on your hands. But today you can find this wicked monster not only clogging your email accounts but also affecting your favorite search engine’s performance. In the Search Engine Optimization field, spamming of search engines has become a serious issue in recent times. The biggies in this field, like Google and Yahoo! have already woken up to this threat and have taken major steps to try and counteract spammy tricks. Read on for more information about this new hazard to hit the SEO world and how it is affecting online businesses globally.

What is SEO Spamming?

The act of spamming with respect to search engines essentially refers to the use of any sort of illegal techniques or tactics to artificially manipulate search engine results in order to improve a page’s ranks. Everybody knows how important it is for a business to gain high rankings for visibility on the Internet, which contains more than 100 million websites today. This is where SEO comes into play: for actively ‘optimizing’ a website by changing its internal and external aspects so that it can be easily indexed by search engines, hence increasing its chances of getting high rankings in search results. SEO spamming or Black Hat SEO, is the ‘darker’ side of SEO, where people use unethical, questionable and banned practices for increasing the traffic to their sites to see their way to the top of the search ladder. There are numerous SEO providers today who try to lure clients into their trap by promising to get their website on the first page of Google within no time. But it is alarming to know that most of the time these companies do not even notify their unsuspecting clients about their usage of spam techniques before they sign on the dotted line. This results in the website owners getting into a dangerous situation with the search engines. So to avoid getting your website into a situation like that, educate yourself about unethical SEO practices and the companies that deal with them.

Consequences of SEO Spamming

Using Black Hat SEO techniques to attract traffic has proven to be not such a great idea after all. Every search engine has framed its specific rules and prohibitions for the detection of spam. There are related penalties too, based on the seriousness of the threat that a particular spam practice poses to the search engine. Your site can be awarded with demerit points which would lead to its rankings getting reduced to a significant extent. It has also been seen that such websites are often given a zero PageRank, taken off from the indexes and can even be completely banned for their malpractices. The implication of such cases is very serious and it can take you months to request a search engine to lift its ban from your website, when you finally correct your mistake and promise not to repeat it again. Since these Black Hat techniques are now widely known in the industry, I strongly advise not to try any of them for the interest of your own business.

Techniques to Avoid

The list that I have compiled below is not exhaustive in nature and mainly consists of the basic spam tactics to avoid. Apart from this, you can read up about Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, familiarize your self with the do’s and don’ts of developing a website and make sure that your SEO vendor is not engaged in any kind of practice outside of the given rules.

1. Keyword Stuffing: This practice involves repeating and multiplying the same keyword phrase in comment tags, meta tags, ALT tags, with the hope that doing so will bring up that keyword in the first page of a search engine. The key to avoiding this is to ensure that certain targeted keywords are not repeated more than five to six times within a page having a word count of about 200. There are free tools available online, like the Keyword Density Analyzer, to help you detect the keywords you might have ended up using too frequently in a web page.
2. Cloaking: It is a stealth technique that deals with using software which directs search engine crawlers to a set of pages, made specifically for the purpose of tricking the crawlers, and redirects the user to an entirely different set of pages. The user of course, is kept unaware of the spam pages and is directed to the actual website. Cloaking is by and large an unnecessary practice, but it can be used for certain ethical SEO reasons at times. For example, if a product or service is illegal for sale in a certain region, the user can be automatically redirected to a page which does not mention the illegal products at all.
3. Hidden Links or Text: This technique mainly consists of putting hidden links or text in a web page, which would be readable by search engine crawlers but not human users. There are mainly two kinds of hidden texts: one is the text which is of the same color as the background making it invisible for the human eye, but detectable by crawlers. The other kind is the text that is hidden under document layers or inserted behind images. Search engines hate this form of spamming and devalue pages containing such incidents, in a jiffy.
4. Link Farms: The emergence of link farms begun when webmasters realized the huge amount of importance given by Google to incoming links. Typically, link farms contain numerous websites links belonging to different categories which have no relation to your website’s content. Hence, pages like these are of poor quality and contain irrelevant and useless information. Even the reciprocal links from these pages are worthless and they do nothing more than associate your site with poor neighborhoods. Google has strict guidelines which mention that there should no be more than 99 links in a single page. Moreover, search engines can easily detect your link farm with the help of link pattern recognition and blacklist your webpage within seconds.
5. Mirror Domains and Duplicate Content: Spammers build many mirror sites which have identical content but are associated with multiple servers having different URLs. So a website have multiple domains can achieve top search rankings with the help of the same keywords and text appearing a number of times. But search engines are smart enough to notice the duplicity in contents and suppress the incestuous link circles without much difficulty.