Search Engine Spam

Looking at Search Engine Spam
Search engine spamming is the unethical practice for optimising a website to rank highly on the search engine results pages. Spamming is used to trick the search engines so that your web pages achieve higher rankings with the use of some tactics, including keyword stuffing, hidden text and links from ‘poor quality’ sources etc.

All search engines state that they penalise websites that use spamming techniques. Despite this, many less than ethical webmasters have been using these black hat techniques to confuse the search engines into giving irrelevant web pages higher placement in their search engine results.

Each of the major search engines provide specific guidelines describing what webmasters should and should not do to their web pages in order to achieve a better search engine ranking.

There are many tactics that are considered search engine spam and these include (but not limited to):

Keyword Stuffing
Mirror/Duplicate Content
Tiny / Hidden Text
Doorway Pages
Link Farms
Cloaking
Hidden links

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, search engines are quickly catching on. Some won’t index pages believed to contain spam and others will still index, but will rank the web pages lower.

Producing the most relevant results for any particular search query is the determining factor of being a popular search engine and each search engine’s objective is therefore to produce the most relevant results to its visitor’s sears. Every search engine measures relevancy according to its own algorithm, thereby producing a different set of results.