The Ingredients That Go Into Spam

May/June 2007 Issue: Page 28

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Do you know enough about search spam to stay out of danger?

"Never watch sausage being made," folks say, lest you would find the process so unappetizing that you'd never eat it again. Regardless of how you feel about Spam®, the venerable luncheon meat, all search marketers must understand the ingredients that comprise search spam.

In our last column, we explored the dangers of spam, which include bad publicity and getting banned from the search engines. We also looked at a spam technique called cloaking, in which spammers feed a different page to the search spider than what they show to real people.

This time around, let's look at stupid content tricks. The goal isn't to teach you how to use spam techniques, but rather to help you spot them on your site (oh no!) or on your competitors' (so you can report them). Content spammers generally employ two kinds of tricks: page stuffing and doorway pages. Let's look at each one in turn.

Page Stuffing

Content spammers treat their Web pages like a Thanksgiving turkey. They stuff as much extra content into each page as possible, hoping they'll include something that search engines like. Let's look at the three major types of content spamming tricks:

Hidden text

Don't use tricky techniques to show the search spider text that is not seen when a reader looks at your page. In the old days (two years ago), content spammers tried displaying text with the same font color as the background color. Today the trendy spammer uses style sheets to write keywords on the page that are then overlaid by graphics or other page elements. Whatever the technique, if the search spider sees your words but people never do, that's spam. The only exception to that rule is HTML comments, which are ignored by both the spider and the browser.

Duplicate tags

In times past, the use of multiple title tags (and other meta tags) was rumored to boost rankings. Although few search engines fall for that trick nowadays, spammers have adjusted. The same style sheet approach that can hide text can also overlay text on top of itself, so it is shown once on the screen but listed multiple times in the HTML file, adding emphasis for the repeated keywords.

Keyword stuffing

Also known as keyword loading, this technique is really just an overuse of sound content optimization practices. Do emphasize your target keywords on your search landing pages, but don't overuse them. Dumping out-of-context keywords into an tag's alternate text attribute, or into