SEO Spam….Does this really exist? 
Category:  Knowledge Base 
Group:  Best Practices 
Product:  All versions

The answer to this question is yes. SEO Spam is not so easily defined. Trying to figure out what the rules are can be difficult. This type of spam is also known as Spamdexing (you are spamming indexes). It can appear in different ways. Some can be recognized as spam right away. Others are not so easy to detect. Here are a few tips that might help you stay out of the SEO Spam arena

 • The first line of defense is to follow good website design practices. Remember to follow the guidelines established by the Search Engines that you will be using. These guides are very straight forward and will help you to steer clear of their spam categories.

• Do not use hidden text, create false links or use cloaking on your web pages. These tactics are usually banned by most search engines.

• Creating false links on your website can increase your rankings very quickly, but this option can also get your site blacklisted (also known as black hat optimizing). Crawlers will eventually figure out that the links are interconnected.

• If you use an SEO consultant, make sure that they are reputable. Many consultants’ in this field will tell you that some spam techniques are “OK”. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true it’s NOT! You may be the one who has to deal with the aftermath of SEO spamming.

Here is an example of how one company used “black hat SEO”. A large retail company in 2010, linked thousands of unrelated websites in the retail business to their site during the holiday season. They did this by linking specific keywords based on an SEO consultant’s advice. This tactic did work. The retail company’s ranking with search engines did increase above the retail competition, but was uncovered by one of the largest New York news agencies months after they put this into action. The SEO consulting company was fired by the large retail chain. This is how easy it is for companies large and small, to fall into the “SEO Spam” zone. Many of the major search engines now monitor this type of optimization. Just to be clear, here are a few more tips that should be avoided:

• Transparent links – These links cannot be seen by the users because they are the same color as the background.

• Misleading links – Appear to lead you to one place but actually lead you to another.

• Keyword stuffing – Repeating keywords over and over in the content or meta tags of the website.

• Redirect pages –Site visitors who land on this page are told to wait so that they can be redirected to another site. These pages are typically coded for SEO, but are of no use to the visitor. • Link farms – Pages of links created to increase rankings with search engines artificially.

• Page high jacking – Coping a well-liked page on the WWW and using it to speak for your website to search engines. When the visitor obtains this page by doing a search, they would click through the link that would take them to your actual page.

Please note that some of the SEO Spam methods can result in your website completely banned or severely punished by search engines. This should be a deterrent for you NOT to uses these tactics for your website.

(Publish Dt) 03/31/2011
Buzz: SEO spam,sapmdexing,SEO,black hat SEO,

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