“A special report from the Search Engine Strategies 2004 Conference, December 13-16, Chicago.
There's a subtle boundary that separates acceptable search engine optimization practices from the shadier techniques used by spammers. How can you recognize the difference between white-hat and black-hat techniques?
The first step to determine if you are playing with fire is to understand the philosophical question, "what is considered spam?" The attendees were presented with a fairly clear definition of search engine spam from Tim Mayer, Director of Product Management for Yahoo Search. Yahoo! defines spam as "pages created deliberately to trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant, or poor-quality search results." This is similar to the definitions offered by Google and MSN as well.
Shari Thurow, Webmaster/Marketing Director from GrantasticDesigns.com suggested various questions that site owners should ask themselves related to content and their optimization techniques. While acknowledging that these were "obvious" questions, Thurow said "they just don't get asked enough." She strongly suggests that site owners make sure that the content benefits the target audience—site visitors—and is not just thrown on a page to skew the search engine ranking algorithms.
Sixteen flavors of search engine spam
Thurow next presented a slide that contained a comprehensive list of sixteen tactics that are considered search engine spam. These techniques include:- Keywords unrelated to site
- Redirects
- Keyword stuffing
- Mirror/duplicate content
- Tiny Text
- Doorway pages
- Link Farms
- Cloaking
- Keyword stacking
- Gibberish
- Hidden text
- Domain Spam
- Hidden links
- Mini/micro-sites
- Page Swapping (bait &switch)
- Typo spam and cyber squatting”
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