Spamdexing

Spamdexing is computer jargon, a portmanteau of "spamming" and "indexing". It refers to the practice on the World Wide Web of deliberately modifying HTML pages to increase the chance of them being placed high on search engine relevancy lists. People who do this are called search engine spammers.

Search engines use a variety of algorithms to determine relevancy ranking. Some of these include determining whether the search term appears in meta-keywords[?], others whether the search term appears in the body text[?] of a web page. A variety of techniques are used to spamdex, including listing chosen keywords on a page in small-point font face the same colour as the page background (rendering it invisible to humans but not search engine web crawlers).

Search engine spammers are generally aware that the content that they promote is not very useful or irrelevant to the ordinary internet surfer. They try to use dirty methods that will make the website appear above more relevant websites in the search engine listings.

Here are some common spamdexing techniques:

• Hidden or invisible text
  • Disguising keywords and phrases by making them the same colour as the background, using a tiny font size or hiding them within the HTML code such as no frame sections[?], alt tags[?] and no script sections[?].

• Keyword stuffing
  • Repeated use of a word to increase its frequency on a page. Most search engines have the ability to analyze a page and determine whether the frequency is above a "normal" level.

• Meta tag stuffing
  • Repeating keywords in the Meta tags more than once, and using keywords that are unrelated to the site's content.

• Hidden links
  • Putting links[?] where visitors will not see them in order to increase link popularity.

• Mirror websites
  • Hosting of multiple websites all with the same content but using different URL's.

• Gateway or doorway pages[?]
  • Creating low-quality web pages that contain very little content but are instead stuffed with very similar key words and phrases. They are designed to rank highly within the search results. A doorway page will generally have "click here to enter" in the middle of it.

• Page redirects[?]
  • Taking the user to another page without his or her intervention, e.g. using META refresh[?] tags, CGI scripts, Java, JavaScript, or server side techniques.

• Cloaking[?]
  • Sending to a search engine a version of a web page different from what web surfers see.

• Code swapping
  • Optimizing a page for top ranking, then swapping another page in its place once a top ranking is achieved.

Spamdexing often gets confused with legitimate search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, which do not involve deceit.

Spamming involves getting web sites more exposure than they deserve for their keywords, leading to unsatisfactory search results. Optimization involves getting web sites the rank they deserve on the most targeted keywords, leading to satisfactory search experiences. To be sure, there is much gray area between the two extremes. The root problem is that search engine administrators[?] and web site builders have different agendas: the search engine wants to present valuable search results, the webmaster just wants to come up first, particularly if he/she runs a commercial website and needs visitor traffic from search engines and directories. For that reason, many search engine administrators say that any form of search engine optimization used to improve a website's page rank is nothing else than spamdexing.

Many search engines check for instances of spamdexing and will remove suspect pages from their indexes.

External Links

• The Search Engine Spam Police (http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/02/sd0115-spam-police)
• Search Engine Spamming - A Moment of Clarity (http://www.outfront.net/tutorials_02/business/sespamming.htm)
• Sins of The Internet: Spamming Search Engines (http://www.internet-tips.net/Legal/sins_searchspam.htm)
• Search Engine Damage Control (http://www.searchengineguide.com/wi/2002/1030_wi1)