What is Search Engine Spam?
The definition of search engine spam or the spamming of search
engines is broadly defined and each search engine has their own
version. The important version of the definition is
the definition of the search engine to which you are wanting to obtain high
rankings.
Spammers are those websites, webmasters and that don't follow the
guidelines setup by the individual search engines and directories.
Follow the rules or they will kick you out.
Far be if from me to give you yet another version, so, here are some
excerpts from some of the search engines (and/or directories) and links to their
definition of spamming.
Google
"... certain actions such as cloaking, writing text that can be seen by search
engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling
search engines may result in permanent removal from our index."
For more info, see
http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html
DMOZ (Netscape Directory)
(Spam Policy Updated 07/11/02)
"Spam occurs if identical pages are submitted to the same category multiple
times, if one site is submitted to multiple inappropriate categories, or if a
submission otherwise violates our Submission Policies or disrupts the ODP... Sites
that repeatedly or persistently spam the directory will be blocked from submission,
and their sites may be removed from the directory. Sites affiliated with known
spammers may also be removed from the directory and/or blocked from
submission."
For more info, see
http://dmoz.org/guidelines/spamming.html
FAST
(Spam Policy 2002-01-07)
"Spam Stuffing' or just 'Stuffing' is material inside otherwise good documents,
but which is not meant to be read by people. This may be lists of search terms that
are unreasonably long, irrelevant or misleading, ("Search Term Stuffing")
and lists of links that are too long or link to documents on an unrelated subject
("Link Stuffing"). Search Term Stuffing usually aims at bringing the
document containing it high on the list of results when searching for one of the
terms contained within the Stuffing. Link Stuffing works much like Page Spam,
promoting the pages linked to."
For more info, see
http://www.alltheweb.com/info/spampolicy.html
Inktomi
"Inktomi encourages Web designers to focus most of their energy on the content
of the pages themselves. Energy spent optimizing for search engines is useful up to
a point; but beyond that it tends to be counterproductive... A common mistake is
loading the Title and Description full of keywords; while this may help slightly
with ranking, it makes the search listing visually unappealing to the user, which
means they don't click on it. We ... recommend writing a unique Title and
Description for each page."
"(Regarding the) Keywords meta-tag... put phrases that
relate to this page in the Keywords line, separated by commas. Don't bother
including very common phrases, such as "expert" or "rock and
roll". The Keywords line should always be tailored for the particular page; if
it's the same for every page on your site, you are really better off not using the
Keywords line at all. Don't overload the Keywords line; as a rule of thumb, if
you're putting things in the Keywords line that aren't in the rest of the page,
you're probably putting too much in."
For more info, see
http://www.inktomi.com/services/web_search/spampolicyfaq.html
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