Spamdexing – The SEO NO…NO
November 17th, 2008 by Dan
Spamdexing can be defined as the deceiving repetition of phrases unrelated to a topic of a particular website aiming to manipulate the algorithms of a search engine, resulting in a higher ranking on searches.
It involves several improper referencing techniques and methods all of which considers the algorithms that search engines use to determine the relevancy of a page. For the Internet user it simply means that a search result may deliver completely irrelevant results, making the search less efficient.
How it works
Spamdexing uses several methods, ‘overstuffing’ being the most popular. Overstuffing entails placing masses of irrelevant information on a site’s Meta tags. Repeating a keyword or phrase causes it to receive a higher relevance ranking so spamdexers repeat them hundreds of times, cleverly making them invisible to visitors.
A common hiding technique is to make the text the same colour as the background or placing text behind images so that they are not visible to the user. Another method is to use a competitors name or trademarks as keywords so that a user searching for them will end up on your page.
Why it’s not clever
Search engines take keyword spamming very seriously and most search engines run continuous checks to detect spamdexing and should they find websites guilty they are thrown off the search index completely or they place the website at the bottom of the list. These spamdex detection programs might pick up innocent websites as spamdexing due to small design decisions like repeating words for aesthetic reasons or placing words over images.
It is therefore imperative to make sure your website designer is up to date with the latest techniques and programs. Apart from the risk of being caught by search engines and losing a ranking completely, the hits that these websites receive are mostly only from misdirected traffic and will rarely translate into sales.
Marketers often chase a higher positioning on search results as it increases traffic to a website dramatically, but this will be useless if visitors do not buy the product or service you are offering.
The alternatives
Search engines are very clear on what they consider healthy ways to improve rankings. It is recommended to make use of an SEO expert to asses your website and make the necessary changes to achieve higher rankings. One approved technique is to include keywords in your website name, this is the title in the bar at the very top of the page.
Include plural and singular forms of a key noun and possible misspellings of your company name in the Meta tags. Include keywords in the content of your website and keep it updated.
Most search engines now offer pay-per-click packages where they increase your listing to the top of the page and it is indicated as a sponsored link. This is very costly and many Internet users avoid these and go directly to organic results. Experts recommend website owners to stick to the recommended search engine optimization techniques and grow an organic ranking.
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Right Spam indexing is very damageable for your site. If this is the way in which you site is optimized this process may lead to blacklist of search engine so never go for this options.
Black hat process, the search engine checks regularly the updating matter of sites; if it finds irrelevant, hidden text then search engine puts in the blacklist.
[...] in the SEO industry know that spamdexing doesn’t pay in the long term. We also know that major search engines have evolved their search [...]
[...] Spamdexing – The SEO NO…NO Spamdexing can be defined as the deceiving repetition of phrases… [...]
[...] black hat techniques involve trickery and deception, of which there are many. Spamdexing (repeating unrelated phrases), hiding text (behind graphics, in a colour similar to the background, [...]