Seo And Spamming

If you can forgive the Monty Python reference, you’ll actually understand that people like spam. Spam is reliable and delicious. Sure it isn’t as nutritious as other things out there, but it’s unbelievably filling. Of course we’re talking about the food product. When we talk about spam, as in the internet jargon, people’s faces suddenly start to sour.

Spam, The Annoying Kid Of The Internet

Remember when you were a kid. Remember when you used to play on the playground peacefully with your friends, or sometimes, alone. You enjoyed it. You had fun. But somehow, there was always this one kid that came up to you and annoyed the hell out of you. The kid that annoyed everyone. The kid that somehow ruined everyone’s day.

Not put that into an internet perspective. You’re browsing the web, minding your own business, then boom! Spam. Spam email. Spam messages. Spam comments. Spam pop ups. All of them going on and on, begging you to and look at this and that, to try this and that.

That’s what spam does. It repeats things over and over until you either get fed up and give in, or get fed up and leave.

So What Does This Have To Do With SEO?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, refers to techniques that are aimed at attracting the attention of search engine crawlers and spiders. Most of the time, this is accomplished through creating content that repeats specific keywords and key phrases a number of times so as to rank higher in search engine indexes. It is highly encouraged that in doing SEO, SEO practitioners keep ethical and steer clear of spamming practices. Specifically, no spamming.

However, in their attempts to create more and more material for the same site, which most times, involve the same keywords and phrases; or in attempts to get higher site rankings and better indexing results, some SEO practitioners use spamming methods.

Some of these methods are hiding repeated keywords in the site code, even hiding them in plain site simply by matching the font color and the background color; resorting to the use of miniscule font sizes, so as to hide repetitive and senseless keywords; using mirror sites for the simple reason of returning more hits; link farming, which are site pages that have no other purpose than to link to the respective sites; using doorway pages, which have little to no content apart from a plethora of keywords (these are usually sites that serve no other purpose than link people to the actual site); redirecting the user to sites laden with keywords, then taking them back to the actual site, etc.

Over time, search engines caught wind of these spamming practices and have created ways of detecting them. When detected, sites get penalized, either by getting their indexes reduced, thus lowering their ranking, or by being flagged and banned by the search engine altogether.

It’s easy to see the appeal of SEO spamming, but in the long run, it actually proves itself to be counter productive. There’s nothing better than good old fashioned, honest SEO content.