Spam is one of the unfortunate realities of the net. The phrase in the real world is that ’some things are inevitable, like death and taxes.’ On the net, the inevitability is spam. It’s annoying and people try to get around it while at the same time cursing its perpetrators. What many people don’t realise is that spam isn’t always created by the evil villains of the net. There are many sites around that venture into spam entirely innocently.

Any site can stumble into spam territory. A fine line needs to be trod when developing a site’s search engine optimisation. Unfortunately, many sites stumble. Having an SEO expert on board can be a help, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult. Having knowledge of dangerous areas can also help.

Most of the points below are well-known areas of spam. They are also areas in which innocent mistakes are most commonly made.

• Keyword stuffing. This is one of the first examples of website spam that most site owners ever learn about, and yet it remains one of the most common forms of accidental spamming. The biggest culprit is internal links. While it is advisable to make the most use possible out of your internal navigation, ‘the most use possible’ does have a limit. Many sites make the mistake of featuring their keyword in every link, particularly on the footer navigation where it’s less likely to annoy users. It may be less visible to users there, but search engines know keyword stuffing when they see it

• Cloaking. Presenting one form of information to the search engines and another to your users is cloaking. Sometimes, this can happen for genuine reasons, but can still set off search engine filters. It’s a good idea to consult your SEO expert if you decide to include image descriptions within your code or otherwise feature cloaked information

• Buying links. Purchasing links is a common form of acquiring the link juice a site needs to rank well. As the search engines aim to boost sites that are naturally popular, bought links are becoming an issue for SEO. Companies still commonly use them, but it is suspected that they may soon adversely affect rankings

• Networking your sites. If you have several sites, it can seem like a good idea to use them to boost each other’s rankings. This isn’t always the best way to go about it. The search engines are sensitive to artificial link popularity and have developed filters to give less weight to links owned by a site. In the past, Google has penalised sites that have used a network to gain popularity

• Redirects. Implementing a 301 permanent redirect can be a great way to retain the history of an old page when you replace it. Redirects have, however, become a common form of spam as disreputable companies use innocent-looking pages to lure users onto their sites. If your new page is very dissimilar in subject to the old one, you could be taken off the index

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