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April 21, 2003
Spam is an overused word. Describing everything from luncheon “meat” foodstuffs to the flood of advertising email we all receive each day, the simple, four-letter word is as widely used as many other deceptively descriptive four-letter words are. Suffice it to say that SPAM is not counted amongst the most honourable words in the English language. The IT world has forced the English language to evolve very quickly as old words are applied against new ideas. The word “Spam” has become synonymous with words such as “junk” and “waste”. In the search engine optimization field, the word Spam is used to describe techniques used to try to fool search engine spiders. This section will outline a few of the more frequent Spam techniques used by webmasters or unscrupulous SEO practitioners. Check your websites for any incidents of Spam and do your best to get rid of them as they could seriously damage your search engine rankings.
Hidden Text
Some webmasters hide text by making it the same colour
as the background of the page they are working on. The thinking is that one can
put a collection of keywords on their website that are “invisible” to most site
viewers but will be perceived and recorded by search engine spiders. This
technique actually worked on first generation search engines but was heavily
exploited by the adult entertainment industry, forcing search tools to make this
technique punishable by banishment. The easiest way to find hidden text on a
site is to hold down the left mouse button and drag your mouse across the entire
body of the page you are looking at. This will highlight all text and images on
the page, including any text that may be the same colour as the background. If
you find hidden text on your site, delete it or make it visible by changing the
text colour.
Off Topic or Redundant Text
Websites exist to spread messages about
specific things, be they products, people or politics. If your site uses text
that does not relate to the topic of the site in any way, it will likely be
considered Spam. If this type of Spam appears on your site too often, your site
will likely be considered banned.
Keyword Repetition
Meta-Tags
Any excessive repetition of specific words in
the keywords meta-tag will be considered spam and will likely cause a website to
rapidly lose position on search engine indices. A common rule of meta-tags is to
only use the same word a maximum of three times in the Keywords tag.
Body Text
While there is no common rule for the frequency
of use for keywords in the body text, it is important to note that each word
used on your site must be relevant to the topic of your site and must be used in
a proper context. In other words, you can’t just bulk a number of words in the
lower section of your website and hope search engines reward your efforts with
high rankings. Unless each word used has a good excuse for being there, it will
likely be considered spam.
Transparent or Hidden Links
Many search engine spiders work by following all links found on any page they
come across. A technique that once produced strong results was to hide links by
using a tiny, invisible image link, generally phrased as a 1 pixel X 1 pixel
dot. This technique simply doesn’t work anymore and will likely get a site using
it banned for spamming. Unfortunately, this technique is a bit more difficult to
find unless you know what you’re looking for. The easiest way to look for a
hidden image link is to examine the source-code of your website by clicking on
the word View (File Edit View Insert…) in the upper text menu on your browser.
From the drop-down menu, choose Source. This will bring up a notepad document
with the source-code of the page. Go to the word Edit and choose Find. Enter the
following information into the dialog box that opens, “width="1" height="1"
border="0"”. If the Find feature offers anything up in return, chances are you
should take a close look at it. If it is a link to another URL, you should
immediately remove it.
Source and more: Search Engine Guide
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