Top 5 SEO Spam Techniques (to avoid)
Posted by Ben on 25 July 2008 in SEO
Before you begin to analyse your website traffic, it is best to check for search engine spam - clearing out the spam can help you rank far better and these quick tips should help you do just that...a website spring clean if you will...
Website spam are negative features that exist on or as part of your website that can be both created discreetly and even by accident.
Spam can be defined as website or web page content with the sole intention of creating a improving search engine ranks without adding value to the visitors experience on the website. Unethical SEO is sometimes called blackhat SEO or spamdexing with ethical optimising known as organic SEO or whitehat SEO.
This SEO article is not scare mongering post; this is what actually goes on in the world wide web! It is better to know what constitutes malpractice than make a mistake - SEO ignorance is not the best policy!
1. Spammy Inbound Links
Inbound links are important to search engines as essentially they act as a vote for the website. An inbound link from certain websites / web pages equates to a far larger vote as some websites are seen to carry more authority online than others. There are several ways of assessing inbound link quality but quick methods include the relevancy of the content on the page, the link's anchor text, the website PR (Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin's page rank). Any sort of link building campaign should be carried out to create awareness to a site's value, using quality link bait (resources that visitors value). They should not use link farms, mirror sites (conceptually the same site), and must be carefully planned.
2. Cloaking and stealthing equals wrong doing!
Cloaking is the blackhat practice of having something written into the website code to feed the search engine's spiders / bots that is hidden from the website user. Google et al have cottoned on to these techniques so I have no problem in telling you, but cloaking can include using 1 pixel images with spammy alt text (the text that displays to people using text only browsers), CSS usage to alter display tags and styles, etc, and displaying font as the same colour as the background, so that it is only read by the bot, and not by the user. Anything that tricks the search engine bot into believing something that will ultimately be discovered and blacklist your site (remove it from the search results) doesn't make SEO sense - so don't try it!
3. Keyword Stuffing Stuffing Stuffing
Keywords are great. Good solid keyword research using trusted keyword research tools and queries made to find your site are even better. What is not so good is the repetitive repetitive repetitive use of keywords keywords (..etc!) to improve ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for certain terms or phrases. Interestingly, search engine algorithms have come to distinguish between websites that cram themselves full of keywords and those that are organically (or naturally) created, hence the phrase organic SEO. Search engines are developing all the time to give weight to things like stop words (if, it, is, this, etc) in a way that measures the natural appearance of these words in the content as a proportion of the overall keyword rich content.
An interesting point on the side is that search engines can also provide results based on the meaning of the content of a webpage rather than simply displaying the literal meaning of individual words, including the build of the sentences, organisation and display of content, use of stop words, misspelled words, synonyms - Google is particularly successful in this way. Good search engine optimising and web copywriting involves writing in a keyword rich manner, using synonyms where appropriate, but make sure content is written naturally for the visitors of the website, all of the time. Webmasters sometimes gain visitors from such unethical means but it's not likely to be content that people will trust, shop from or return to.
4. Doorway Pages Close Search Engine Doors
An early form of unethical SEO-ing, is the use of doorway pages, also known as bridge pages, gateway pages or portal pages. Doorway pages use a form of web page / site cloaking which when clicked on from the SERPs, sends the visitor through a quick redirect process to a different age to what the search engine expects. This can be done through a variety of means, typically using the http header (not html ), JavaScript, or other means of server-side redirection.
Doorway pages are different from landing pages, which are content-rich, value-adding web pages.
5. Canonical Issues
Although, not typically SEO spam behaviour, canonicalisation errors can cause your website to upset the search engines. The test is to see whether your website renders in a browser using a variety or URL's such as http://www.example.com, http://example.com, but without redirecting to your preferred domain. Essentially canonicalisation errors can cause websites to be read by search engines as two different websites - duplicate content problems!!! To correct this, you can redirect these other sites to a preferred domain URL using a 301 request in the .htacces file found on the server.If you don't have one simply open notepad and save as .htaccess (please note, nothing should come before the dot in the file name: .htaccess).
Ethical SEO for Successful Website Longevity
The variety of spamdexing techniques are vast. Many people who use unethical forms of SEO are doing so unknowingly, although there are some website owners, many in fact, who continually design new methods of spamming the search engines for financial gain, but generally leads to their downfall. Add value to your visitors and you will build success rather than playing cat and mouse with the search engines.
None of the unethical SEO practices above, or any other forms of blackhat SEO for that matter, are used in Bourn Design's Web Development or SEO services. We hope these tips have been helpful but please feel free to get in touch if you have any other SEO queries.