Spam Means Different- for different search engines

The word “spam“, in the context of search engine optimization tips, refers to any unethical practice used to improve a page’s ranking in search engine results. Exactly what is considered spam?

Search Engines Define Spam Google defines spam as “trying to deceive (spam) our web crawler by means of hidden text, deceptive cloaking or doorway pages.” You can report sites you suspect of spam at Google’s Report A Spam Result page.

Yahoo defines spam as “pages (that) are created deliberately to trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant or poor-quality search results.” They have a pretty extensive list of what techniques they consider spam at their Yahoo! Search Technology Content Quality Guidelines page.

MSN Search gives a few spamming techniques “discouraged” by MSN Search; among them are keyword stuffing, invisible text, or false links.

Ask Jeeves/Teoma defines spam as “the practice of purposely deceiving a search engine into returning a result that is unrelated to a user’s query, or that is ranked artificially high in the result set.” They give quite a few examples.

Spam Techniques To Avoid Invisible Text. Text that is the same color as the background pages; enables site owner to place more keywords on the page and attract more spiders. Sponsored Links

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Keyword Stuffing. Pretty much what it sounds like. Keyword stuffing consists of placing as many relevant or irrevelant keywords and phrases as you possibly can in content and Meta tags. Unrelated Keywords. If you have a site about Depression era glass bowls and your keywords include “Viagra” and “Britney Spears”, that would be considered unrelated keywords. Doorway Pages. Doorways are pages optimized only for search engine spiders in order to attract more spiders, thus more users. Usually optimized for just one word or phrase and only meant for spiders, not users.

Tiny Text/Alt Text. Tiny text consists of placing keywords and phrases in the tiniest text imaginable all over your site. Most people can’t see them, but spiders can. Alt text spamming is stuffing the alt text tags (for images) with unrelated keywords or phrases.

Mirror or Duplicate Sites. Don’t duplicate your site, name it something different, and submit it again. This is not only ill advised, but it borders on stupid. Search engines will know if you do this.

Submitting Repeatedly. Submitting your site to a search engine or directory repeatedly in a short period of time is a great way to get your site banned, or at least delayed.

Spam: Only Good For Breakfast To recap: spamming the search engines may seem like the quick road to Easy Street, but it can get you in big trouble and is usually quickly discovered. The bottom line about spam and search engine optimization is this: a person who is determined to get around search engines, inflate their search rankings, or perform unethical SEO maneuvers is asking for trouble. Avoid search engine optimization spam techniques

The Wrong Way of SEO

Article by: Margarette Mcbride

In the world of search engine optimization or SEO, SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques of which search engines do not approve. According to SEO Philippines commentators, they have classified these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing. So what are the things that an aspiring SEO consultant should know about Black Hat SEO?

SEO Techniques Classified As Black Hat SEO:

Content Based Black Hat SEO Techniques

* Keyword Stuffing
o This involves the calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword count, variety, and density of the page. This is useful to make a page appear to be relevant for a web crawler in a way that makes it more likely to be found. Older versions of indexing programs simply counted how often a keyword appeared, and used that to determine relevance levels. Most modern search engines have the ability to analyze a page for keyword stuffing and determine whether the frequency is consistent with other sites created specifically to attract search engine traffic. Also, large webpages are truncated, so that massive dictionary lists cannot be indexed on a single webpage.

* Hidden Texts
o Disguising keywords and phrases by making them the same color as the background, using a tiny font size, or hiding them within HTML code such as “no frame” sections, ALT attributes, zero-width/height DIVs, and “no script” sections. People screening websites for a search-engine company might temporarily or permanently block an entire website for having invisible text on some webpages.

* Meta Tag Stuffing
o Repeating keywords in the Meta tags, and using meta keywords that are unrelated to the site’s content. Though it was the perfect black hat SEO technique, this tactic has been ineffective since 2005 according to SEO Philippines specialists.

Link Based Black Hat SEO Techniques

* Link Farms
o Involves creating tightly-knit communities of pages referencing each other, also known humorously as mutual admiration societies.

* Hidden Links
o Putting links where visitors will not see them in order to increase link popularity. Highlighted link text can help rank a webpage higher for matching that phrase.

* Sybil Attack
o This is the forging of multiple identities for malicious intent, named after the famous multiple personality disorder patient “Sybil”. A spammer may create multiple web sites at different domain names that all link to each other, such as fake blogs known as spam blogs.

* Spam Blogs
o Spam blogs, also known as splogs, are fake blogs created solely for spamming. They are similar in nature to link farms and in conjunction with Sybil Attack.

* Cookie Stuffing
o This involves placing an affiliate tracking cookie on a website visitor’s computer without their knowledge, which will then generate revenue for the person doing the cookie stuffing. This not only generates fraudulent affiliate sales, but also has the potential to overwrite other affiliates’ cookies, essentially stealing their legitimately earned commissions.

Spamming

* Blog Spams
o This is the placing or solicitation of links randomly on other sites, placing a desired keyword into the hyperlinked text of the inbound link. Guest books, forums, blogs, and any site that accepts visitors’ comments are particular targets and are often victims of drive-by spamming where automated software creates nonsense posts with links that are usually irrelevant and unwanted.

* Comment Spams
o According to SEO Philippines specialists, comment spam is a form of link spam that has arisen in web pages that allow dynamic user editing such as wikis, blogs, and guestbooks. It can be problematic because agents can be written that automatically randomly select a user edited web page, such as a Wikipedia article, and add spamming links.

* Wiki Spams
o Using the open editability of wiki systems to place links from the wiki site to the spam site. The subject of the spam site is often unrelated to the wiki page where the link is added. In early 2005, Wikipedia implemented a default ‘nofollow’ value for the ‘rel’ HTML attribute. Links with this attribute are ignored by Google’s PageRank algorithm. Forum and Wiki admins can use these to discourage Wiki spam.

Other Types of Black Hat SEO Techniques

* Mirror Websites
o Hosting of multiple websites all with conceptually similar content but using different URLs. Some search engines give a higher rank to results where the keyword searched for appears in the URL.

* URL Redirection
o Taking the user to another page without his or her intervention, e.g. using META refresh tags, Flash, JavaScript, Java or Server side redirects.

* Cloaking
o Cloaking refers to any of several means to serve a page to the search-engine spider that is different from that seen by human users. It can be an attempt to mislead search engines regarding the content on a particular web site. Another form of cloaking is code swapping, i.e., optimizing a page for top ranking and then swapping another page in its place once a top ranking is achieved.Visit http://www.myoptimind.com for more info.

The importance of SEO Consulting

Article by: Sunil Panjabi

A SEO Consultant uses techniques like on-page and off-page optimization, and modifying of web content, to speed up and perfect the process of making your web site the favorite of search engines.

A SEO Consultant is a mandatory friend, philosopher, and guide that every website and its owner require. Without the right SEO consulting, it might be difficult for a website to remain afloat in the choppy waters of the Internet. To get started on a business, especially an online one, a person has to first get the help of a web hosting services, and probably that of web designers, and if it is an ecommerce site he would also have to acquire the necessary ecommerce software. But with all that, if the site is not optimized to suit the behavioral norms of search engines, it will remain dead for all practical purposes. So, to get the site spruced up and functional round the clock, the services of an SEO Consultant become imperative.

The main duty of an SEO Consultancy is to make sure that the web site entrusted to them gets a good search engine ranking. This means that when customers make a query on any matter that has relevance to the site’s contents, the site should come up among the top results that search engines pour out in answer to the query. The key techniques, deployed by a SEO Consultant to ensure search rankings, is the use of the right keyword in the required density, off-page optimization, and tailoring of the website and its contents to make it more attractive to search engines.

Of the various methods used by any SEO Consultancy to modify the web site to make it more popular with search engines, right selection of the keyword and proper placement of it are the most important. By tracking people’s search patterns and search queries, SEO Consultants find out which are the keywords most often searched by people. They then incorporate these keywords to the web pages that the site owner wants the people to see. For example, a seller of shoes might have created his web content around the word shoes. By the right SEO consulting, he will be able to understand that it is the word walking shoes, or running shoes, or leather shoes or any other variations of shoes is the more searched common methods. A SEO Consultant would advise him to create web content around that keyword.

Another facet where a SEO Consultant gives emphasis is off-page optimization or link building. Link building refers to connecting your web site to better-known sites in a way that links from those sites point back to your site. By doing the right SEO consulting, you will get information on which are the sites that should remain connected to your site to help in your search engine ranking. Internet is awash with the names and addresses of companies that offer SEO consulting services and there are also whole directories of SEO Consultants available on the net.

Looking for Reliable SEO Company

Article by: Submit Elite

After you have been dealing for some time with SEO on your own, you discover that no matter how hard you try, your site does not rank well or that your site ranks well but optimizing it for search engines takes all your time and all your other tasks lag behind. If this is the case with you, maybe it is better to consider hiring a SEO company to do the work for you. With so many SEO companies out there, you can’t complain that you have no choice. Or is it just the opposite – so many companies but few reliable?

The price for the services of a SEO company is competitive. It can give any website owner a run for their money. Once you find the right SEO Company for you, you are sure that the price you paid for is compensated. But what if you were able to get the services of a fake or scam SEO Company?

In order to prevent this thing to happen, you should be cautious in looking for the needed SEO Company. There are some tips that you can consider before grabbing the first SEO Company that offers you their services.

1.Avoid getting SEO companies that send their advertisements through scam emails. If an SEO company sent you an email informing you of the services that they offer, then do some research about them. This is the initial tactic of scam companies. More reliable SEO companies do not need to advertise themselves because their clients speak for them. Satisfied clients will truly be too happy to share to others the services that they received from their SEO Company. They will surely refer them to friends and acquaintances that need their services as well. It is better to inquire from a SEO Company that is referred to you than from those that you just received emails from.

2.Do not bite to the SEO Company’s promise of achieving high rank immediately after you acquired their services. This is indeed an appealing offer but you should watch out. It is not easy to achieve a number 1 rank in the span of two-weeks or less. It requires a lot of talent to achieve this goal. You can expect to gain a high rank with the help of the SEO Company but it requires time to achieve it. It is better to go for the low but continuously moving up rank rather than the fast high rank but done in illegal manner.

A SEO Company that offers this tactic a is scammer because they are using black hat tactics to get their preferred rank. A black SEO Company also tend to use a ‘cloaking’ approach that can cause you to be penalized and removed from major search engines once they find out about it.

3.If the seo company offers a relatively low price compared with the high promises that they offer, beware you may be getting what you paid for. The work done by the SEO Company is tedious so they need to be compensated for it. No matter how good they are in the service, they still need to ask for a competitive price for the work that they are willing to offer. In fact, a professional SEO company tends to collect higher fees because their consultants are already aware of the hard work that they will do to make website a better place for traffic. But there are instances when a new SEO Company can offer low price since they are just starting and wanted to create a portfolio, a name for itself and create clients referrals. You can opt for their services but be wary that you have to face the risk of taking it.

4.Do they offer subscription services? SEO is a constant process and if you want to rank well and keep on like that, efforts are necessary all the time. Because of this, it is better to select a company that includes post-optimization maintenance, than get a company that pushes your site to the top and then leaves you in the wild on your own.

5. Cheap is more expensive. This is also true. If you think you can pay peanuts for a professional SEO campaign, then you need to think again. Professional SEO companies offer realistic prices.

We tried to mention some of the most important issues in selecting a SEO company. Of course, there are many other factors to consider and each case is different, so give it some thought, before you sign the contract for hiring a SEO company.

Some Common Myths Related to an SEO Company

Article by: Bergstrom SEO

There are many myths related to SEO and SEO company. Some of them are so common that many online marketers take them to be true and stick to the misconceptions. ROI being the prime matter of consideration, the webmasters ignore the SEO myths and look for the best SEO company that can help them generate revenue out of their online business. Here are some of the common myths about the SEO company

The Best SEO Company can Guarantee top 10 Ranking

There are many SEO companies that promise top 10 rankings for their clients and persuade them to hire their services. Some of the online marketers are also in the misconception that hiring one of the best SEO companies can make their way to top rankings on the search engine result pages. But the truth is the rankings are the rewards by the search engines given to a website considering their quality and usability for the users. Hence, while making your decision about selecting an SEO service provider make sure that you go by the past performance record of the company not by the promises.

Once the top Rank is Achieved it Lasts for Ever

It is still a popular misconception among the webmasters that once they achieve top rankings on the search engine result pages it will last for ever. Unfortunately for them, SEO is an ongoing process and you have to continue the optimization process of your website as long as you want to continue and achieve success in your online business. The SEO service providers discover and implement latest techniques so as to retain the positions on the SERPs.

More the number of Inbound Links, Higher is the Page Rank and SERP Rankings

The secrets of quality inbound links are still unknown to many SEO companies. Some SEO service providers go on building links without considering the quality of the links; where as the major search engines give priority to quality, not quantity. If you are hiring an SEO company ensure that they give importance to links from reputed and relevant sites. Avoiding any spammy technique of link building is equally important if you want to avoid any penalty by the search engines.

More traffic Means More Conversion Rate

Many webmaster foster the misconception that more number of traffic can result in higher conversion rate. It is not true always. If your SEO Company promises you to generate more traffic, make sure that they are talking about niche traffic. Achieving high rankings in search engines and generating more traffic are two different aspects. You may get high ranks on SERPs and get more online visitors to your website, but it is difficult to say that it can increase your conversion rate.

SEO Service Provider Can Guarantee Conversation Rate

No SEO company can guarantee increased conversion rate on the website they are optimizing as it is basically dependent on the webmasters and the quality of services they are providing. Of course, the best SEO company can ensure you getting most target traffic by reaching out to the niche audience.

Once you are aware of the truth about the SEO companies, you can take informed decision while selecting an SEO service provider.

About Author:- Bergstrom-seo.com is an emerging SEO Company that delivers exceptional search engine visibility through its new Best SEO Company to its clients who are located around the world. Its services entail keyword-based content development, website optimization, strategic link building, and social media optimization.

Unethical SEO Techniques

By: James Day

Search engine spaming substantially increases the possibility that a website will appear at the top of the search results for a certain keyword. Companies that use unethical types of SEO to improve their search engine positions are just asking to be penalized. Acquire your search engine position fairly, never sacrifice your principles just to acheive your goals. There will be great risks involved, such as, your website can be penalized or worse banned from many search engines. Here are several unethical SEO techniques:

Always aviod keyword stuffing and the repeditive use of the same keywords in your META tags, comments, alt images or anywhere in your content. Also avoid Inserting hidden links or text that are only readable by search engines but can not be seen by the human eye. For instance, using a white link or white text with the appropriate keywords in a web page with a white background. Your visitors can not detect it and won’t even notice the difference, however search engine spiders can read hidden text.

Mirror web pages, these are several sites having identical contents but different URLs, all linking to one another constructed for one objective. Also doorway web pages, which are webpages of poor quality, constructed to rank high for one or more selected keywords. These do not affect your website visitors and are only constructed for search engines. These pages can contain the exact content of other sites but generally exhibit only a link pointing to the main page with no navigational menu.

URL cloaking delivers many different web pages for search engines and visitors. Webmasters construct their servers so that they can identify IP addresses of the search engine spiders then provide them with content rich and optimized pages, at the same time displaying different web pages for individuals. URL cloaking can also redirect a visitor to their home page.

Link farms and FFA pages are purposely created to acquire link popularity only and should be avoided at all costs. Link farms are typically one page websites consisting of up to one hundred or more links to different categorized websites having no similarity with your website’s content. Search engine spammers should be aware of the fact that their pages content are of poor quality and are useless to individuals that visit their site.

SEO spamming can in reality bring about high rankings. Keep in mind that the effect is only temporary. Webmasters using these types of SEO methods can benefit from their high search engine position for days, weeks, even months however, once search engines discover webmasters using these unethical techniques, then they will be banned from the search engine index possibly for good. After being removed from the index it is very difficult to be re-indexed. You may need to start over and secure a new domain name. Before using any unethical SEO techniques, think wisely and weigh the options. Are you prepared to put your entire internet business in jeopardy just for months of obtaining a high rank in the search results?

How to Detect Fake SEO Consultants

Article by: Aniruddha Badola

As a small or medium business owner, you may want to advertise and promote your website as economically as possible. In recent years, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has emerged as one of the surest and cheapest way for long-term business promotion. A typical business owner is not expected to be knowledgeable about SEO and its benefits. Even if an owner knows SEO, he/she is not sure how to choose an ethical SEO who can get the job done at the best rates and within timeline. Choosing a SEO consultant or company for your website can be a tiring and overwhelming experience. Every SEO specialist will boast about adopting latest path breaking SEO techniques, testimonials from clients and gurantees of #1 placement on Google. But how you as a non expert select a genuine SEO consultant? Listed below, are few pointers on how to detect a fake SEO consultant.

1. #1 Google ranking for Website: If any company guarantees you that they can place your website on number one position on Google for your keywords then take my advice – RUN in the opposite direction. Its obvious this company is desperate to get business and is willing misleads you to get your hard earned cash. No company can make such claims. Google’s algorithms are one of the best kept secrets. What SEO companies can do is optimize and promote the website according to widely known principles, intelligent guess work, best practices and lot of hard work. At most a company can claim that they can acquire good ranking like top 10 on Google. But even then, verify their past track record to guess on how the fared with other clients.

2. Very Low Prices: Many companies charge ridiculously low amount of money for quite a lot of service. As an astute business person, you can intelligently deduce that any work that requires hours and hours of hard work, research and analysis by a team of experts cannot come cheap. Most of the times, specialists from various fields like programmers, content writers, SEO analyst, link builders etc. pool their resources to make a site successful on Google and obviously SEO services cannot come as cheap as many companies charge.

3. Secret and Proprietary Technique That Cannot be Revealed: I don’t think we should even elaborate on this. As the owner of the website, you should be aware of what’s happening to your site and what steps are been taken to optimize and promote it.

4. Recommending Black Hat Techniques: Lot of companies recommends shady tactics known as black hat practices to get your site up in search engines. Not only these practices have very short term benefits but they can be very counter productive because search engines eventually catch website following these shady practices. Many websites big and small have been heavily penalized for using these techniques. So play safe and avoid these SEO companies like plague.

5. Using Outdated Techniques: Once upon a time, techniques like reciprocal link exchange, keyword stuffing etc. were used to get good rankings. Google and other search engines have wisened up and rank a site for its worthiness and not just back links and keyword stuffing. Choose a company that will recommends steps to make your site useful & relevant and not take short cuts.

If you keep these tips in mind while choosing a SEO company for your website then it’s very much possible that you will finally select a SEO company that knows their job and can handle your website promotion very well.

7 Things To Look For When Hiring An SEO Firm

Article by: Adrian Adams

You know by now that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique used by website owners to drive “natural” traffic to their website. You also know that SEO is performed by publishing keyword-rich articles and by playing around with the html code. But do you know that SEO is not as easy as it sounds – it needs an experienced firm to perform SEO, and it needs some time and research to hire such a specialized firm?

But we’ve made the task simpler for you and here is a checklist you must use when it comes to hiring a SEO firm:

Is the firm reputable? The SEO firm you are employing must be on a sound footing and it must stand head-to-head with its peers in the industry. This is not to say that we have anything against small SEO outfits who are just starting out – go with them if you feel they have the credentials and the capacity to do your work, but at your own risk.

Does it have an established client base? If an SEO firm is good, clients will flock to it automatically. So, does your SEO firm have a list of esteemed clients, or is it into SEO for websites who should be confined into the web junkyard? Find that out and go with an SEO firm that has a solid client base.

Does it use black hat techniques? Black hat techniques stand for unethical ways of performing SEO. If an SEO firm has ever spammed, or lifted articles, or created web farms to generate traffic, or used any technology to fool the search engines, then stay away from such a firm. You can find out if a firm is into black hat techniques by looking at their client list and talking to the clients, specially the old clients.

Does it have the right employees? Your SEO firm should not just have technically qualified, experienced employees – it should staff them in adequate numbers too. There’s really no point of going to a well reputed SEO company that has 5 employees and a roster of 200 large clients.

Does it offer all the SEO services? A good, well-established SEO firm will offer all SEO services under one roof – sourcing and submitting articles, programming, directory submissions, blog posting, search engine submission, link building, etc. If your SEO firm offers only a part of such services, ditch it, because you can’t be running around to two or more companies trying to perform SEO on your one and only beloved site.

What about its employees’ skill sets? You can get the best articles published and the best of sites to link to your website, but that won’t do a lick unless your website’s design, layout, navigation is search-engine friendly. The employees at a good SEO firm must be experts in website design, programming, understanding how search engines function, link building, directory submission and web traffic analysis, and these guys must be working in-house – these skills must not be outsourced.

How does the SEO firm respond? Does the firm respond in quickly or do they return calls in a few days. If they take over 24 hours to return your call, don’t even consider them.

Once you have determined that an SEO firm fits your requirement, check to see if their costs will match your budgets and if they have a person on board whom you’ll be comfortable working with. And if everything seems okay, go for them.

SEO Spam

Article by: BizAtomic

Spam, in almost any form, is bad for your health. The vast majority of web users would agree with that statement and nobody would even think of the finely processed luncheon meat-product made by Hormel. Even the word itself is infectious in all the worst ways, being used to describe the dark-side and often deceptive side of everything from email marketing to abusive forum behaviour. In the search engine optimization field, spam is used to describe techniques and tactics thought to be banned by search engines or to be unethical business practices.

While writing copy for our soon to be revised website, the team put together a short list of the most outrageous forms of spam we had seen in the last year and a short explanation of the technique.

Please note, we do not encourage, endorse or suggest the use of any of the techniques listed here. We don’t use them and our clients’ sites continue to rank well at Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. Also, since Google has been the dominant search engine for almost five years, most of the spammy tricks evolved in order to game Google and might not apply to the other engines.

1. Cloaking
Also known as “stealth”, cloaking is a technique that involves serving one set of information to known search engine spiders while displaying a different set of information on documents viewed by clients. While there are unique situations in which the use of cloaking might be considered ethical in the day-to-day practice of SEO, cloaking is never required. This is especially true after the Jagger algorithm update at Google, which uses document and link histories as important ranking factors.

2. IP Delivery
IP delivery is a simple form of cloaking in which a unique set of information is served based on the IP number the info-query originated from. IP addresses known to be search engine based are served one set of information while unrecognized IP addresses, (assumed to be live-visitors) are served another.

3. Leader Pages
Leader pages are a series of similar documents each designed to meet requirements of different search engine algorithms. This is one of the original SEO tricks dating back to the earliest days of search when there were almost a dozen leading search engines sorting less than a billion documents. It is considered spam by the major search engines as they see multiple incidents of what is virtually the same document. Aside from that, the technique is no longer practical as search engines consider a far wider range of factors than the arrangement or density of keywords found in unique documents.

4. Mini-Site Networks
Designed to exploit a critical vulnerability in early versions of Google’s PageRank algorithm, mini-site networks were very much like leader pages except they tended to be much bigger. The establishment of a mini-site network involved the creation of several topic or product related sites all linking back to a central sales site. Each mini-site would have its own keyword enriched URL and be designed to meet specific requirements of each major search engine. Often they could be enlarged by adding information from leader pages. By weaving webs of links between mini-sites, an artificial link-density was created that could heavily influence Google’s perception of the importance of the main site.

In the summer of 2004, Google penalized several prominent SEO and SEM firms for using this technique by banning their entire client lists.

5. Link Farms
Link farms emerged as free-for-all link depositories when webmasters learned how heavily incoming links influenced Google. Google, in turn, quickly devalued and eventually eliminated the PR value it assigned to pages with an inordinate collection or number of links. Nevertheless, link farms persist as uninformed webmasters and unethical SEO firms continue to use them.

6. Blog and/or Forum spam
Blogs and forums are amazing and essential communication technologies, both of which are used heavily in the daily conduct of our business. As with other Internet based media, blogs and forum posts are easily and often proliferated. In some cases, blogs and certain forums also have established high PR values for their documents. These two factors make them targets of unethical SEOs looking for high-PR links back to their websites or those of their clients. Google in particular has clamped down on Blog and Forum abuse.

7. Keyword Stuffing
At one time, search engines were limited to sorting and ranking sites based on the number of keywords found on those documents. That limitation led webmasters to put keywords everywhere they possibly could. When Google emerged and incoming links became a factor, some even went as far as using keyword stuffing of anchor text.

The most common continuing example of keyword stuffing can be found near the bottom of far too many sites in circulation.

8. Hidden Text
It is amazing that some webmasters and SEOs continue to use hidden text as a technique but, as evidenced by the number of sites we find it on, a lot of folks still use it. They shouldn’t.

There are two types of hidden text. The first is text that is coloured the same shade as the background thus rendering it invisible to human visitors but not to search spiders. The second is text that is hidden behind images or under document layers. Search engines tend to dislike both forms and have been known to devalue documents containing incidents of hidden text.

9. Useless Meta Tags
Most meta tags are absolutely useless. The unethical part is that some SEO firms actually charge for the creation and insertion of meta tags. In some cases, there seems to be a meta tag for virtually every possible factor but for the most part are not considered by search spiders.

StepForth only uses the description and keywords meta tags (though we are dubious about the actual value of the keywords tag), along with relevant robots.txt files. All other identifying or clarifying information should be visible on a contact page or included in the footers of each page.

10. Misuse of Directories
Directories, unlike other search indexes, tend to be sorted by human hands. Search engines traditionally gave links from directories a bit of extra weight by considering them links from trusted authorities. A practice of spamming directories emerged as some SEOs and webmasters hunted for valuable links to improve their rankings. Search engines have since tended to devalue links from most directories. Some SEOs continue to charge directory submission fees.

11. Hidden Tags
There are a number of different sorts of tags used by search browsers or website designers to perform a variety of functions such as; comment tags, style tags, alt tags, noframes tags, and http-equiv tags. For example, the “alt tag” is used by site-readers for the blind to describe visual images. Inserting keywords into these tags was a technique used by a number SEOs in previous years. Though some continue to improperly use these tags, the practice overall appears to be receding.

12. Organic Site Submissions
One of the most unethical things a service-based business can do is to charge clients for a service they don’t really need. Charging for, or even claiming submissions to the major search engines are an example. Search engine spiders are so advanced they no longer require site submission to find information. Search engine spiders find new documents by following links. Site submission services or SEO firms that charge clients a single penny for submission to Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask Jeeves, are radically and unethically overcharging those clients.

13. Email spam
Placing a URL inside a “call-to-action” email continues to be a widely used type of search marketing spam. With the advent of desktop search appliances, email spam has actually increased. StepForth does not use email to promote your website in any way.

14. Redirect spam
There are several ways to use the redirect function to fool a search engine or even hijack traffic destined for another website! Whether the method used is a 301, a 302, a 402, a meta refresh or a java-script, the end result is search engine spam.

15. Misuse of Web 2.0 Formats (ie Wiki, social networking and social tagging)
An emerging form of SEO spam is found in the misuse of user-input media formats such as Wikipedia. Like blog comment spamming, the instant live-to-web nature of Web 2.0 formats provide an open range for SEO spam technicians. Many of these exploits might even find short-term success though it is only a matter of time before measures are taken to devalue the efforts.

Search engine optimization spam continues to be a problem for the SEO industry as it tries to move past the perceptions of mainstream advertisers. When under-ethical techniques are used, trust (the basis of all business) is abused and the efforts of the SEO/SEM industry are called into question. Fortunately, Google’s new algorithm appears to be on the cutting edge of SEO spam detection and prevention. Let’s hope 2006 is the year the entire SEO industry goes on a spam-free diet.

The Dark Side of SEO: Black Hat SEO

Article by: Jeff Casmer

Search engines are not infallible. We have all, at some point in our searching lives, found a link on the web that seemed interesting or helpful but when clicked were disappointed to find that the destination page was rubbish. Not only is it frustrating but a complete waste of time.

To receive a good ranking, some web page designers use spamdexing or as we like to call it black hat seo. Spamdexing or black hat seo techniques are the use of various methods to deliberately manipulate HTML pages to artificially increase their positioning on the search engines results page.

Everyone has been a victim of spamdexing or black hat seo. From the student who is doing research for their Shakespearean essay, to the small business owner trying to produce content for their niche related site, even the minds behind the search engines are annoyed to say the least.

Spamdexing takes advantage of search engines by completely ignoring respectable forms of search engine optimization. Spamdexers use a variety of techniques to make sure their websites are displayed in the fertile first two pages of search results; in many cases the pages are irrelevant and even incomprehensible. Spamdexing includes the following techniques.

Keyword Stuffing:

This involves the practice of overusing a word to increase the keyword frequency on a page. Most modern search engines now have the ability to analyze whether the frequency is above normal level.

Hidden or Invisible Links:

When a webmaster creates multiple sites on the same or similar topic and links them all together through invisible links. The multiple sites may or may not have unique content, in most cases they do not.

Hidden Text:

Putting text (usually keywords) where visitors will not see them to increase a pages keyword relevancy. This is commonly done by making some text the same as the background color of the page ie. White words on a white background.

Meta tag Stuffing:

Repeating keywords in the Meta tags more than once and/or using keywords that are unrelated to the sites content.

Link Spamming:

Google considers page rank through link analysis, the more web pages that link to your website the higher the ranking. Some webmasters may create multiple websites at different domain names that all link to one another. This is the worst form of back hat seo techniques.

Cloaking:

This technique involves showing visitors and search engines different versions of a page.

Each of the above methods is a form of spamdexing or black hat seo, and will get webmasters who put them to use banned from the search engine. Google has taken an active role to combat against spamdexing. From January 25, 2005 it went after websites that specialized in Google bombing.