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Search engines and spam

What can I do to NOT get any spam penalties from the search engines?

First, let me just say that I report search engine spam regularly. Some search engine marketers feel that I shouldn't report spam because the search engines don't pay me, but I do not agree with that point of view. Search engine spam degrades the quality of search results, and I am a die-hard searcher.

I hate email spam. I hate telemarketers calling me during dinner. And I hate search engine spam.

Okay, end of rant.

Part 5 of Search Engine Visibility details all the different spam methods, without actually teaching you how to spam.

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But if you need some general spam guidelines, here is the best one:

Don't put any invisible elements on your web pages that end users are not meant to view.

Take the "white background to hide white text keywords" as an example. The only reason people use this technique is to boost rankings. How does utilizing this technique benefit your target audience? It doesn't.

Meta-tag descriptions are meant to be viewed. You can often read them in search engine results pages.

Drop-down menu content is meant to be viewed after your site visitors place their cursor over a navigation button.

The only exception I can think of right now is using a blank.gif for spacing purposes. (When browsers support code better, I'll stop using blank.gifs.) No one is meant to see that graphic image. However, stuffing keywords in a graphic image that is not meant to be seen is considered spam.

Alternative text, also, is meant to be viewed. If your site visitors are using a text-only browser, they will be able to view the alternative text in your graphic images. Also, if you are using the browser Explorer on a PC, you can view alternative text when you place your cursor over a graphic image.

Cloaking and spam

Cloaking is the technique of feeding search engine spiders one web page, and feeding all other end users a different web page. Many cloaking companies are spammers.

Cloaking companies commonly use scare tactics to convince people that cloaking is necessary. They will tell you that others can figure out your online marketing strategy just by looking at your web pages. ("Stealing your meta tags" is a common scare tactic used.) This is not an accurate characterization of the situation at all. No one will suddenly appear at the top of search engine results just from stealing your meta tags.

Three components are necessary in obtaining long-term search engine positions: keyword-rich text, a link architecture the spiders can follow, and popularity. Cloaked pages and doorway pages cannot get popularity.

What many people do not understand is how doorway page/cloaking companies work. They create thousands of pages for a single keyword or keyword phrase. All of these pages are fed to the search engines, polluting their indices with unnecessary information. These pages are quite unattractive, and they contain so much gibberish that I understand why they have to be cloaked. End users would never continue visiting a web site if they actually viewed these pages.

Furthermore, many cloaking companies purchase domain names and use them to artificially boost a site's link popularity. All a search engine has to do is determine the IP address of all of these fake sites. If your site is a part of this artificial link building, your site can get banned and penalized, too.

There are legitimate uses for cloaking, but if you don't have the search engines' permission to cloak, I would not use it as an online marketing strategy.

My philosophy is simple. The search engines' goal is to provide relevant search results. So if you want to use the search services, you should help them deliver relevant results. Follow the rules and guidelines they have set forth in their own sites, in publications like Search Engine Watch, and at conferences. That way, both you and the search services will benefit.

Conclusion

So always design and write your pages for human viewing. If you are trying to hide text and links to boost search engine visibility, you are probably spamming.

Don't spam the search engines. You wouldn't like it if 3,000 telemarketers called you during dinner. So don't pollute the search engines with 3,000 domains not meant for human viewing.

Who knows? It would be quite amusing to see doorway page companies get their telemarketing just desserts.

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