A Guide to Search Engine Spam - Part One

The majority of internet users receive at least a few spam e-mails a day, and if you don't, then you're in the minority. There are a variety of different types of spam across a range of media ranging from good, old-fashioned e-mail spam (unsolicited e-mail) to the less obvious types, such as search engine spam, which use deceptive methods to increase search engine exposure for certain websites.

For the purposes of this blog post, I'm going to focus on search engine spam. In Part One I'll explain what search engine spam is,  identify the common types of this spam, and in Part Two, I'll detail some tools and steps that will help you identify if a website is using spam techniques.

Before I get into the post, I want to state that QueryClick do not engage in any unethical or spam techniques. We always have and always will have a 100% ethical approach to search engine marketing as we believe that trying to deceive the search engines is a short sighted tactic that will only result in penalisation for websites. In the words of Monty Python - I don't like spam

What is Search Engine Spam?

Search engine spam is the use of deceptive or manipulative tactics to artificially increase the rankings of a website. People who use these techniques operate outside of Google's webmaster guidelines, and in particular, the quality guidelines section.

It's worth remembering that Google aims to:

"Return the most relevant search result, as fast as possible, for the user's search term."

Sites that use spam techniques to artificially improve rankings are subject to penalisation within the search engines when the spam techniques are discovered. SEOs that engage in these types of practices are known in our industry as 'Black Hat SEOs' (this is a reference from old cowboy movies where the baddies always wore black hats).

The most common types of search engine spam can be categorised into two main areas: Content Spam and Link Spam.

Common content spam tends to involve:

• Hiding text on a page using font styles or white content on a white background
• Keyphrase stuffing
• Cloaking - Serving different content to users than to Google
• Content that has been scraped or stolen from another website

Google are cracking down on this type of spam and have recently targeted 'thin content' - content that is low quality, lacking substance and content that may have been scraped or copied from other, more reputable websites, with their recent Farmer / Panda algorithm update.

Common link spam includes:

• Paid links
• Link exchanges
• Article spinning
• Deceptive re-directs

If I see an unusual change in competitors' rankings for a specific keyphrase set, or a website suddenly starts ranking for a competitive term, I always have a closer look at the website for spam techniques, and if something looks too good to be true, it normally is.

In part two post I'll be looking at the types of search engine spam in more detail with steps and tools to identify if a site is spamming and what you can do about it.