First coined by Eric Convey of The Boston Herald in his article "Porn sneaks way back on Web" (May 22 1996), "spamdexing" is "a combination of spamming — the Internet term for sending users unsolicited information — and "indexing." Granted, at that time, Mr. Convey was discussing the keyword tactics that online adult content companies were using to trick people into visiting their website, but the phrase stuck and applies through to today; albeit encompassing more than just keyword stuffing.
Search Engine Marketing Tactic - What is Spamdexing?
Spamdexing today refers to any method of search engine marketing applied to a website or web page that is purely for the purpose of artificially boosting page rank and serves no useful purpose to the reader or visitor. Thus, any process used to "manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system" is considered to be spamdexing.
Basic Types of Spamdexing Used as Search Engine Marketing Tactics
Although spamdexing can rear its ugly head in an innumerable number of forms and variations, each instance falls within several category types:
- Content Spam - includes keyword stuffing and hidden text, meta tag stuffing, doorway pages, scraper sites and article spinning.
- Link Spam - includes hidden links, spam blogs, cookie stuffing, link farms and page hijacking.
- Mirror Websites - refers to multiple websites with identical or virtually identical content, but different domain names.
- URL Redirection - refers to taking a visitor to a web page different from that of the one they wanted to go to without their knowledge and/or permission.
- Cloaking and Sneaky Redirection - the use of altered web pages wherein one version is presented to the search engine while another version is presented to the visitor.
Sophisticated Types of Search Engine Marketing Spamdexing
The harder society attempts to limit and remove fraudulent activity, the harder a small few work to come up with more sophisticated methods of avoiding detection. For example, virus programmers work to cause havoc with computers while anti-virus software manufacturers work to keep computers safer; which in turn causes virus programmers to look for holes to exploit in such programs. Black hat search engine marketing tactics are no different with several sophisticated versions appearing to include:
- Google Bombing - refers to the practice of several websites all using the same or similar links to specific web pages for the purpose of increasing page rank by making that specific web page to appear more authoritative.
- Googlewashing - refers to both the practice of changing the meaning of a word or phrase with the intention of negatively affecting the page ranking of other websites or web pages and/or the practice of using content published by others to outrank the content of the original author.
Search Engines Blacklist for Spamdexing
Regardless of the type of spamdexing employed by so-called webmasters and search engine marketing professionals, search engines continue to modify their indexing processes and web crawlers to combat such illicit tactics. Businesses and individuals found to be making use of spamdexing within their web pages as part of their search engine marketing, risk having their ranking forced to zero (and thus end up on the last page of any search) or worse; they could be blacklisted.
After putting in all the time and effort to artificially boost their page rank, such individuals could wake up one morning to find their pages removed from the search engine altogether. Thus the message is clear, focus on quality content and forget about short-cuts.
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