Spam tactics may be deliberate and unintentional in internet marketing. What’s certain is that they are a regrettable and unavoidable reality for all those organizations with an online business. Perpetrators of spam, spamdexing, or black hat techniques will tempt using sales patter – guaranteed search engine rankings, campaigns measured in weeks not several weeks, and a quick shot of immediate search engine visibility. Sooner or later , most website owners will have been pitched these empty guarantees . Most will have considered, even if only for a moment, the appealing prospect of circumnavigating a drawn out and potentially pricey optimization or paid search campaign.
The tough facts are that these shortcuts can cause damage to existing search engine rankings and harm long-term listings if search engines like Google or Bing decide that the site has used spam or non-ethical tactics to unnaturally inflate search positions. Sometimes though despite the best motives of all concerned, sites do stray into spam territory. This happens simply through not being aware of what does and does not constitute questionable methods. Spam can happen accidently, particularly when search engine optimization work continues to be performed by novice campaign managers. Being on guard for the following stumbling blocks can help limit mistakes and penalties.
Keyword stuffing: This is the most common of black hat SEO or spam techniques, and can become a problem on a site by simply too placing too much attention on certain key phrases in the dash to enhance search engine ratings. An oversight small site owners frequently make is to believe that they have to place primary key phrases just about everywhere on the page – in titles, headers, alt tags, meta descriptions, body text, and anchor text- and as often as possible. While a certain degree of keyword density is imperative, unneccessary use of key phrases with little or no synonym consideration is usually categorised as spam.
As a standard, anywhere from 5% – 8% key phrase density is satisfactory, but anything over that is considered SPAM. If unpracticed optimizers have been given free control on your site, check that you’ll be not displaying identical anchor text throughout, that titles are restricted to five or six descriptive phrases, that meta tags provide significant, unique details about that web page, that H1 and H2 headers are not simply vehicles for having key phrases in bigger, bold print which the body text utilizes both long and short tail keyword variations.
Cloaking: As the name suggests, cloaking is a means of hiding information on your website. It is commonly used to send one lot of information to the various search engines while presenting a completely different view to the user. Proponents of black hat search engine optimization use cloaking as a way to present a highly optimized page of code for the spiders, often filled with keywords along with other factors which are known to aid favorable rankings. Because these pages in many cases are keyword stuffed, they are of little help or sense to a real user so an alternative version of the page is designed for a human reader. Which page is presented is determined by the IP address or User-Agent HTTP of the requesting user.
Look through your CMS system or FTP files to evaluate that you recognize each listed page. Actually it could be necessary to have a different version for the search engine, for instance image descriptions in the code. If you suspect that cloaking has been performed on your own website, it’s a good idea to consult with an SEO agency or consultancy to go over helpful resolutions.
URL Redirects: Redirection methods have many useful and ethical applications, such as redirecting a user with a bookmarked page to the correct new page when the URL is renamed or moved. However, there are also some non-ethical applications used in black hat SEO and spam which the various search engines will take a dim view of. One example of this is directing a search engine to at least one version of a page full of popular search terms while siphoning the user off to a very different page. Temporary redirects have also been utilized to attempt to steal the PageRank of a well established page and pass on to a new page. These techniques are both identified as spam by the various search engines and can lead to the website being given lower rankings or dropped from the search engine results entirely.
Doorway Pages: Sometimes called bridge or portal pages, a doorway page is quite similar to cloaking in that it is a page that is used to make the search engines think one thing while showing entirely different data to the end user. A doorway page will redirect the user off to another page either via a Meta refresh command, JavaScript, or a link.
It is rather simple to detect a doorway page on your own server as they are clearly constructed for search engine purposes so will contain plenty of keywords, perhaps make little sense to the reader and have very simple navigation structures or links.
The existence of any of these tactics on your site can jeopardize your ranking and may even lead to blacklisting by search engines. Make sure that your SEO program avoids this pitfalls to preserve your good name online!
