The word ‘spam’ in spamdexing says it all. Spamdexing is quite simply the dark art of deception, loading the interent with spam. It entices traffic to a page using improper referencing techniques and methods which adds irrelevant keywords to a particular page, and the hiding them from internet users.

Since the rise of the internet, people started realising the monetary potential in advertising. Spamdexing followed and has been rising steadily since. In fact, to date no one really knows the number of spam sites on the internet, but it is reported to be a very high percentage. Spamdexing is considered offensive and at times can be dangerous. Appearing in print in the 1990’s, it is derived from the word ‘Portanteau’ which is to splice, or merge, two or more words together to form a word that has a dual meaning.

Spamdexing manipulates and inflates search engines, pushing up its ranking in the Search Results so that it almost forces traffic to land on a particular site which may contain absolute nonsense along with loads of advertisements and which have nothing to do with what is being searched for, causing a lot of irritation and frustration.

As well as this, these sites can also raise the ranking of other ‘Spamming’ sites which have been created by spammers, mostly these sites are never seen by humans because they have been created for the sole purpose of promoting other websites by taking advantage of search engine results that rely on authority and relevance as well as keywords. .
Why Spamdexing is Considered a ‘Dark Art’

Worse than being annoying and irritating, it can also be dangerous. You might land on a spamdexed page thinking you have landed on your banks site and happily disclose your personal information, opening yourself up to not only identity theft, but also to having all your money stolen out of your account.

How is it Done?

There are all kinds of ways to practice this dark art. A simple way would be to insert invisible keywords, that is, words which are the same colour as a page’s background. Over indexing pages in search engines, Page Stuffing, multiple mirror site and the like, but one that really stands out is that spamdexers can actually hijack your page, yes really!

This entails the creation of another site which is identical to yours, same titles, meta-data and content, not only can this be devastating to your revenue, it could in fact result in the stolen pages, or website, being boosted far above your own in search engine results and you could even find your site being penalised!

Is There Any Hope?

Spamdexing has done the Internet a lot of damage but there are a variety of techniques available which commit the SEO crime of Spamdexing including spamming and link spamming. A lot of search engines today look for this stuff and will remove anything suspect from their indexes, or even ban a site.

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