Few things illustrate competition as clearly as the Web. After all, how can one website compete with thousands of other websites just like it?
If the average Internet user had an attention span as expansive as a search engine’s listing, there would be nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, that is not the case. A person searching online will likely browse only the top 3 to 5 SERPs (search engine results pages) and stop there. Websites buried on the 10th page and beyond probably will not get much attention unless certain measures are taken.
Those measures are known as search engine optimization (SEO). Experts in this field perform certain procedures that can be seen as a “website boot camp” to get your website into fighting form so it can compete for top rankings in a search engine.
However, as with almost everything else, shortcuts exist that can “cheat” search engines into placing a particular website at a high ranking, even when it offers no real information. These shortcuts are called “spamming”.
SEO spam (or spamdexing) is a set of techniques that manipulate a website to create an unrealistic boost in its rankings on SERPs. Here are just a few examples of SEO spam:
1. Cloaking
Cloaking happens when a website presents one set of information to a search engine and a different set to the user. Usually, the web page’s code appears relevant to the user’s search keywords, but when the user visits that page, he sees a document that has little or nothing to do with his search.
2. Artificially networked sites
There is nothing wrong with creating links from one site to another, as long as those links are relevant and help connect useful information.
However, spammers who use this technique set up several websites and link them together, even when the sites contain no real or useful information. The purpose is simply to create the illusion of a highly referenced site because of its dense network of links. When that happens, it can be considered spamming.
3. Blog and Forum Spam
Online blogs and fora are great sources of information because these formats are built to be updated frequently. That, in itself, is what makes them useful references, which is why search engines like to visit these sites and rank them well for the quality of information they contain.
However, spammers have taken advantage of this by flooding blogs and fora with irrelevant links to the websites they want to generate artificial ranking for. Not only are they cheating the search engine company by misleading users toward irrelevant information, they also interrupt bloggers and forum participants, which is downright rude.
4. Hidden text.
Similar to cloaking, hidden text is meant to make search engines think a page is about one thing when it is actually about another. It fools the search engine this way: the text that the search engine can read is camouflaged by making the font color the same as the background. As a result, the user cannot read what the search engine saw and may end up viewing a document that is not related to the original search.
Other techniques include creating small, nearly imperceptible links that a user can accidentally click, generating more hits for a website even if the user had no intention of visiting that site at all.
By this point, you probably already know why spamming is done. It is a shortcut used by some unscrupulous website owners to make their websites rank high on SERPs. People who pose as SEO experts use these spamming techniques to get paid for doing little to no real work.
Now that you know who they are and how they do it, here’s why you should have nothing to do with spamming or the people who condone it.
The whole point of the Internet was to create a wealth of information that everyone can access and add to. The idea was to build a place where information could be created and shared with others, helping foster understanding despite physical borders.
Other results of this information-sharing have led to the development of e-commerce and online businesses, which are not necessarily bad in themselves. They still contribute to a community of information and sharing.
However, spamming is fundamentally about profiting at someone else’s expense. A spammer profits by using other people to make his website rank higher than others, without taking the necessary time and effort to make his own website as useful and relevant as others have done.
It reflects poorly on website owners who see nothing but their own bottom lines in using the Internet. It exploits the trust and willingness to share that made the Internet such a promising venue for everyone.
Finally, it demeans honest SEO experts who take the time and effort to produce quality websites and make it a point to follow the rules. Search engine marketing is helping to level the playing field so businesses of any size can advertise right alongside each other. And that is a commendable thing, which everyone should gladly support.
Search engines, for their part, are developing smarter technologies to detect spamming techniques and give users the best possible list of information from the Internet. Eventually, the spam methods mentioned above may be eliminated. But it is very likely that other, more sophisticated ones will appear. On your part, you can report spammers to these search engines when you encounter them. The more people like you do this, the easier it will be to identify these cheaters and make it harder for spammers to do their thing.
