SEO Articles

Don't Spam the Search Engines

What Constitutes Spam?

Whilst there are currently many, many techniques considered as spam there will inevitably be new and creative methods that will become regarded as spam and black hat techniques.

Some techniques are clearly considered as an attempt to spam the engines. Where possible, you should avoid these:

• Keyword stuffing. This is the repeated use of a word to increase its frequency on a page. Search engines now have the ability to analyze a page and determine whether the frequency is above a "normal" level in proportion to the rest of the words in the document.
• Invisible text. Some webmasters stuff keywords at the bottom of a page and make their text color the same as that of the page background. This is also detectable by the engines.
• Tiny text. Same as invisible text but with tiny, illegible text.
• Page redirects. Some engines, especially Google, do not like pages that take the user to another page without his or her intervention, e.g. using META refresh tags, cgi scripts, Java, JavaScript, or server side techniques.
• Meta tags stuffing. Do not repeat your keywords in the Meta tags more than once, and do not use keywords that are unrelated to your site's content.
• Never use keywords that do not apply to your site's content.
• Do not create too many doorways, if any, with very similar keywords.
• Do not submit the same page more than once on the same day to the same search engine.
• Do not submit virtually identical pages, i.e. do not simply duplicate a web page, give the copies different file names, and submit them all. That will be interpreted as an attempt to flood the engine.
• Code swapping. Do not optimize a page for top ranking, then swap another page in its place once a top ranking is achieved.
• Do not submit doorways to submission directories like Yahoo!
• Do not submit more than the allowed number of pages per engine per day or week. Each engine has a limit on how many pages you can manually submit to it using its online forms.

For a full report to see if your site is 'inadvertently' being penalised by the Search Engines for spamming you should contact us for an SEO appraisal of your site and content. If your site is not listed it could be simply your site is not SEO friendly.

What Are the Penalties for Spamdexing?

There is an inappropriate amount of fear over the penalties of spamming. Many webmasters fear that they may spam the engines without their knowledge and then have their entire site banned from the engines forever. That just doesn't happen that easily! The people who run the search engines know that you can be a perfectly legitimate and honest web site owner who, because of the nature of your web site, has pages that appear to be spam to the engine. They know that their search engines are not smart enough to know exactly who is spamming and who happens to be in the spam zone by mistake. So they do not generally ban your entire site from their search engine just because some of your pages look like spam. They, generally, only penalise the rankings of the offending pages. Any non-offending page is not penalized. Only in the most extreme cases, where you aggressively spam them and go against the recommendations above, flooding their engine with spam pages, will they ban your entire site. As long as you are not an intentional and aggressive spammer, you should not worry about your entire site being penalised or banned from the engines. Only the offending pages will have their ranking penalized.

However, there does seem to be a move for the search engines to ban complete sites. Recently in 2006 BMW were penalised and banned from the Google engine for what Google infered as spamming and over optimising of their websites.