Tricks and cheats to avoid (search engine spamming)
The aim of search engines is to provide the most relevant results to your search enquiry.
People have been trying to cheat the search engines from the early days of the web. It is not in a search engines interest to return poor matches to the search query that have got there by tricking the search engine. Therefore search engines are constantly under development and are quickly enhanced to overcome any tricks people use in an attempt to fool them.
Search engine spamming covers all methods intended to deceive the search engines about the real content of a website as seen by a human visitor. These dubious practices are wide spread and put your website at risk.
All practices that give false results are actively combated and offending websites are penalised by loosing their ranking or in serious cases, are blacklisted and removed indefinitely from the search engine indexes.
Search engines consider the following attempts to boost search engine positions as spamming:
- Hidden links, hidden text or invisible text anywhere on website pages
- Machine generated pages built for search engines, not for human visitors
- Standalone pages that are not a part of your main website and solely created for search engines, not human visitor
- Websites with no value but a lot of content targeting specific keywords
- Cloaking, where human visitors and search engines do not see the same content
- Link spamming such as free for all link pages or linking with little or no quality content attached
- Cross-linking excessively
- Excessive use of keywords on website pages
- Site submission software using automatic URL submissions
- Submitting your site to a directory or search engine more than one time per month unless they say it is allowed
- Title tag and keyword meta tags with words in that do not appear in the web page content
- Multiple instances of the same meta tag. For example, using more than one title tag.
- Duplicate website pages (same content, different file names)
Spamming or ethical search engine optimisation techniques:
Today's major search engines are sophisticated and actively combat spamming. If spamming is detected,
a website may not be indexed by the search engine. If the search engine considers the spamming to be
severe then the website may be banned from it's indexes completely.
If a spamming technique is driving search engine traffic to your website now, it is fairly certain
that the search engines will eventually spot the indiscretion or a dissatisified searcher will report
your website. This may result in your website ranking being dropped or in the worst cases your website
may be blacklisted and banned from their index indefinitely.
Ethical and valid search engine optimisation practices will deliver long term results without
risking loosing everything. Spamming techniques may work
in the short term but the risk is high and so spamming techniques are not recommended.
Just remember the search engines pride themselves on delivering valid relevant results to their users - they do not want to be fooled.
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