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Inspecting Your Web Site For Spam
by Jim Hedger, SEO Manager
April 16th, 2003
Spam is an overused word. Describing everything from luncheon “meat” foodstuffs
to the flood of advertising Email we all receive each day, the simple, four-letter
word is as widely used as many other deceptively descriptive four-letter
words are. Suffice it to say that SPAM is not counted amongst the most honourable
words in the English language. The IT world has forced the English language
to evolve very quickly as old words are applied against new ideas. The word “Spam” has
become synonymous with words such as “junk” and “waste”.
In the search engine optimization field, the word Spam is used to describe
illegal techniques used to try to fool search engine spiders. This section
will outline a few of the more frequent Spam techniques used by webmasters
or unscrupulous SEO practitioners. Check your websites for any incidents
of Spam and do your best to get rid of them as they could seriously damage
your search engine rankings.
Hidden Text
Some webmasters hide text by making it the same colour as the background of
the page they are working on. The thinking is that one can put a collection
of keywords on their website that are “invisible” to most site
viewers but will be perceived and recorded by search engine spiders. This
technique actually worked on first generation search engines but was heavily
exploited by the adult entertainment industry, forcing search tools to make
this technique totally illegal and punishable by banishment. The easiest
way to find hidden text on a site is to hold down the left mouse button and
drag your mouse across the entire body of the page you are looking at. This
will highlight all text and images on the page, including any text that may
be the same colour as the background. If you find hidden text on your site,
delete it or make it visible by changing the text colour.
Off Topic or Redundant Text
Websites exist to spread messages about specific things, be they products,
people or politics. If your site uses text that does not relate to the topic
of the site in any way, it will likely be considered Spam. If this type of
Spam appears on your site too often, your site will likely be considered
banned.
Keyword Repetition
Meta-Tags
Any excessive repetition of specific words in the keywords meta-tag will
be considered spam and will likely cause a website to rapidly lose position
on search engine indices. A common rule of meta-tags is to only use the
same word a maximum of three times in the Keywords tag.
Body Text
While there is no common rule for the frequency of use for keywords in the
body text, it is important to note that each word used on your site must
be relevant to the topic of your site and must be used in a proper context.
In other words, you can’t just bulk a number of words in the lower
section of your website and hope search engines reward your efforts with
high rankings. Unless each word used has a good excuse for being there,
it will likely be considered spam.
Transparent or Hidden Links
Many search engine spiders work by following all links found on any page
they come across. A technique that once produced strong results was to hide
links by using a tiny, invisible image link, generally phrased as a 1 pixel
X 1 pixel dot. This technique simply doesn’t work anymore and will
likely get a site using it banned for spamming. Unfortunately, this technique
is a bit more difficult to find unless you know what you’re looking
for. The easiest way to look for a hidden image link is to examine the source-code
of your website by clicking on the word View (File Edit View Insert…)
in the upper text menu on your browser. From the drop-down menu, choose
Source. This will bring up a notepad document with the source-code of the
page. Go to the word Edit and choose Find. Enter the following information
into the dialog box that opens, “width="1" height="1" border="0"”.
If the Find feature offers anything up in return, chances are you should
take a close look at it. If it is a link to another URL, you should immediately
remove it.
Pages Generated by Mechanical Means
There are dozens of instant page creators on the market today. Most of
them are junk and produce pages that are easily spotted by search engine
spiders. More often than not, an instant solution is going to get you in
trouble as search engines are deluged with sites that offer no real new
information but are only there in order to try to manipulate search engine
listings. Website design is becoming so simple that the use of mechanically
generated sites is unnecessary.
Cloaking
Cloaking is a technique that offers one set of data to search engine spiders
and another set of data to live-human users. Cloaking is a highly advanced
technique and is not likely to be used without the knowledge of the website
owner or Webmaster. If you think cloaking techniques are being used on your
website, ask an SEO
professional to evaluate and advise.
Duplicate Content
With the advent of affiliate marketing schemes, there are tens of thousands
of sites with duplicate content out there. As they are in the business of
providing accurate and relevant results, search engines do not like sites
that repeat what another site has already said. If your site is one of ten
thousand duplicate sites, chances are you’re not going to rank well
anyway, especially since your site does not get to remain in the search
engine’s database for very long.
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