SEO guruji.com

If you are planning to bring your website to the top of the search listing via spamming, you are playing a risky game! Yes, the website you have created is the result of your hard-earned money and is built on your dreams of a successful eBusiness. And do you want all these dreams to shatter just because you tried a ‘back-door’ entry to the search engines?

Let us begin with the definition of search engine spam. Different people define spam in different ways. When Tim Mayer, VP, Web Search for Overture, considers spam as “pages created deliberately to trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant, or poor-quality search results”, others claim it to be ‘the unethical way to cheat search engines’. All these definitions points at one fact – search engine spamming is a short-cut to disaster! Many people fall prey to the search engine spam techniques without their knowledge. Having an understanding about the black-hat strategies could keep you from being blacklisted by the search engines. Here we will discuss about the methods that multiplies the chances of a site to get listed as a ‘Spam’.

Strict No-No’s

Here is a quick-checklist to find whether your site has the spamming ingredients:

• Invisible text (Text that is of the same color as background)
• Irrelevant keywords
• Improper use of headings (For instance, <h1> - <h6> should not be used within paragraphs)
• Usage of doorway pages or mirror sites
• Stuffing the pages with keywords
• Duplicate content

Above mentioned are the primary contributors to search engine spamming. Now we will move our focus to the secondary contributors. More often it is the unethical or non-organic strategies adopted by the SEO firms that pushes your treasured website to the ‘spammer pit’. Terms like ‘instant link popularity’ and ‘incredulous link framing’ are good to hear, but before you go by their words make sure to check the following:

• A wide majority of the SEO firms create free-for-all (FFA) websites just for the purpose of linking to each other. But the truth is that these sites serve as spam magnets instead of improving the page ranking of the site. By taking your website to participate in a link-farm, you are increasing the chances of getting your site penalized by the search engines.
  

• If the SEO firm claims to offer ‘instant link popularity’, make sure to check which method they are adopting to achieve the same. Remember, the most legitimate way to build the link popularity of a site is through the major directories.
  

• Cloaking – this is a practice of providing different content or URLs to users and search engines. If the search engine finds out that your site serves different content to search engines than to users, your site will be penalized or banned.

• Make sure to check with the firm whether they have the permission to perform automated submission and queries.

You can also refer the guidelines set by popular search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines suggests, ‘submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites’. MSN’s Guidelines for Successful Indexing says that adding a sitemap allows MSNBot to locate all your pages easily. It is advised that you stick to the suggestions of these connoisseurs to save your website from getting blacklisted.

In short, Search Engine Optimization is not a mystery science. It is built on algorithms and pure common sense, if you want to impress the search engines, take the front door instead of battling for the back-door approach!