Spamming Techniques Overviews

Invisible Text: Hiding keywords by using the same color font and background is one of the oldest tricks in the spammers' book. These days, it's also one of the most easily detected by search engines.

Keyword Stuffing: Repeating keywords over and over again, usually at the bottom of the page (tailing) in tiny font or within meta tags or other hidden tags.
Unrelated Keywords: Never use popular keywords that do not apply to your site's content. You might be able to trick a few people searching for such words into clicking at your link, but they will quickly leave your site when they see you have no info on the topic they were originally searching for. If you have a site about Medical Science and your keywords include "Shahrukh Khan" and "Britney Spears", that would be considered unrelated keywords.

Hidden Tags: The use of keywords in hidden HTML tags like comment tags, style tags, http-equiv tags, hidden value tags, alt tags, font tags, author tags, option tags, noframes tags (on sites not using frames).

Duplicate Sites: Content duplication is considered to be search engine spamming also. Sometimes what people do is, they copy the content and name the site differently. But search engines can find it easily and they mark it as a spam. Don't duplicate a web page or doorway page, give them different names, and submit them all. Mirror pages are regarded as spam by all search engines and directories.


Link Farms: Link farm is a network of pages on one or more Web sites, heavily cross-linked with each other, with the sole intention of improving the search engine ranking of those pages and sites.

Many search engines consider the use of link farms or reciprocal link generators as spam. Several search engines are known to kick out sites that participate in any link exchange program that artificially boosts link popularity.

Links can be used to deliver both types of search engine spam, i.e. both content spam and meta spam.

Link content spam

When a link exists on a page A to page B only to affect the hub component of page A or the authority component of page B, that is an example of content spam on page A. Page B is not spamming at all. Page A should receive a spam penalty. Without further evidence, page B should not receive a penalty.

Link meta spam
When the anchor text or title text of a link either mis-describes the link target, or describes the link target using incoherent language, that is an example of link meta spam.

Reapetative Submitting: Each search engine has its own limits on how many pages can be submitted and how often. Do not submit the same page more than once a month to the same search engine and don't submit too many pages each day. Never submit doorways to directories. Decorum

Redirects: Do not list sites using URL redirects. These include welcome.to, i.am, go.to, and others. The complete site should be hosted on the same domain as the entry page. An exception may be made for sites that include a remotely hosted chat or message board as long as the bulk of the site is hosted on its own domain. Actually redirecting of page was not developed for spam, but it is becoming popular technique for spamming.

There are many means of redirecting from one Web page to another. Examples of redirection methods are HTTP 300 series redirect response codes, HTTP 400 series error vectors, META REFRESH tags and JavaScript redirects. As studied earlier these are used to move visitor from one page to another without giving them a single second. In this case the page made for search engine is a spam. Everything on it is an example of either content spam or meta spam.

Alt Text Spamming: Tiny text consists of placing keywords and phrases in the tiniest text imaginable all over your site. Most people can't see them, but spiders can. Alt text spamming is stuffing the alt text tags (for images) with unrelated keywords or phrases.

Doorway Pages: Doorways are pages optimized only for search engine spiders in order to attract more spiders, thus more users. Usually optimized for just one word or phrase and only meant for spiders, not users.

Content Spam: It is possible when different URLs delivers same content i.e. content duplication and same URL can deliver different content as well. Both HTML and HTTP supports it and hence spamming is possible. For example, IMG support and ALT text within HTML means that image-enabled visitors to a URL will see different content to those visitors that, for various reasons, cannot view images. Whether the ability to deliver spam results in the delivery of spam is largely a matter of knowledge and ethics.

Agent based Spam: Agent based delivery is certainly not spam. But it is spam when the use of agent based delivery to identify search engine robots by user agent and deliver unique content to those robots. Since the content is only created for search engines and it is not visible for users, it is always spam.

IP Spam: Identification of search engine robots by IP name or address and delivery of unique content to those robots is considered to be spamming. As in agent based spam, though this technique is also spam when you deliver unique content only to search engines and not the users or visitors.

No Content: If sites do not contain any unique and relevant content to offer visitors, search engines can consider this spam. On that note, illegal content, duplicate content and sites consisting of large affiliate links are also considered to be of low value to search engine relevancy.

Meta Spam: Meta data is data that describes a resource. Meta spam is data that mis-describes a resource or describes a resource incoherently in order to manipulate a search engine's relevancy calculations.

Think again about the ALT tag. Not only does it provide content for a HTML resource, it also provides a description of an image resource. In this description capacity, to mis-describe an image or to describe it incoherently is meta-spam. Perhaps the best examples of meta spam at present can be found in the section of HTML pages. Remember, though, it’s only spam if it is done purely for search engine relevancy gain.

Meta spam is more abstract than content spam. Rather than discuss it in abstract terms, we will take some examples from HTML and XML/RDF in order to illustrate meta spam and where it differs from and crosses with content spam.

Generally, anything within the section of an HTML document, or anything within the section that describes another resource, can be subverted to deliver meta spam.


To make sure that you are not spamming, you need to check out few things. The first and foremost is, you should know whether your content is really valuable for your customers and visitors or not. Any trick to attract more visitors is not going to help you for shorter period of time also. Try and make websites according to user’s tests and preferences. Always remember that, Internet users are information seekers and they want latest content all the time. So think and build a site as of there are no search engines. Avoid automated pages. Google and many other search engines do not index auto generated pages.

Inktomi does accept information pages into their free index and into their paid inclusion programs. For example, if a site contains PDF documents, and you create an information page in HTML with an abstract of each PDF document, that HTML page is acceptable to Inktomi.

How to report Search Engine Spam:

Since spamming practices are constantly evolving, it is important to know what the major search engines specifically say about spam and what practices are definitely not allowed if you would like to rank in top-tier search engines. Plus, every ethical SEO should know how to properly report any spam that they see so the search engines can correct their algorithm accordingly.
How Google Defines Spam

As part of their Webmaster Guidelines, Google outlines techniques to use to help Google locate, index and rank your website. They also specificially state that the following techniques may lead them to remove your site from the Google index:
Hidden text or hidden links.

Cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Automated queries to Google.
Pages loaded with irrelevant keywords.
Multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
"Doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

However you should keep in mind that these aren't the only practices that Google disapproves of. Generally, Google doesn't like their results manipulated by deceptive practices. Their recommendation for webmasters is:

Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles listed above will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

To combat common search engine spam practices employed by rogue SEOs, Google has also posted a list of practices that should raise a red flag when you are looking for a search engine optimizer. According to Google, feel free to walk away from an SEO who:

owns shadow domains
puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
offers to sell keywords in the address bar
doesn't distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear in search results
guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
gets traffic from "fake" search engines, spyware, or scumware
has had domains removed from Google's index or is not itself listed in Google
How to Report Spam to Google

Google has a form that allows you to report spam to Google or you can e-mail Google at spamreport@google.com. Note that Google rarely manually removes websites from the engine. Instead, it tweaks the search engine algorithm and spam detection software to try and eliminate the spam technique that is clogging up the engines.

How Yahoo! Defines Spam
NOTE: Altavista, All the Web and Inktomi are all owned by Yahoo!, so the Yahoo! spam policies and webmaster guidelines also apply to these search engines.

According to Yahoo!, search engine spam is webpages “that are considered unwanted and appear in search results with the intent to deceive or attract clicks, with little regard for relevance or overall quality of the user experience.” Officially, Yahoo! does not want to index sites with:

Text that is hidden from the user
Misuse of competitor names/products
Pages that have substantially the same content as other pages
Multiple sites offering the same content
Pages in great quantity, which are automatically generated or of little value
Pages dedicated to redirecting the user to another page
Pages that give the search engine different content than what the end-user sees
Pages built primarily for search engines
Pages that use excessive pop-ups, interfering with user navigation
Pages that use methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking
Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames
Excessive cross-linking with sites to inflate a site's apparent popularity
Pages that harm the accuracy, diversity, or relevance of search results
Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent, or provide a poor user experience
How to Report Spam to Yahoo!

If you find a site that is spamming in Yahoo!, you can report the spam through a form on their website.

NOTE: In addition to reporting spam, you can also report copyright violations to Yahoo!. To request that they remove any content published in violation of copyright protection, e-mail them at copyright@yahoo-inc.com.

How Teoma / Ask Jeeves Defines Spam
One of the most definitive sources of the Teoma / Ask Jeeves spam policy is on their Site Submission Terms page. Among the techniques that will keep you from being ranked are:
Having deceptive text
Having duplicate content
Having metadata that does not accurately describe the content of a web page
Including off-topic or excessive keywords
Fabricating pages to lead users to other web pages
Showing different content than the spidered pages to users
Using intentionally misleading links
Using self linking referencing patterns
Misusing affiliate or referral programs

How to Report Spam to Teoma / Ask Jeeves
To report search engine spam to Ask Jeeves or Teoma, e-mail them at jeeves@askjeeves.com
How MSN Defines Spam
MSN Search has recently added content guidelines to their website, explicitly stating that the MSNBot will see the following techniques as search engine spam:
Stuffing pages with irrelevant keywords in order to increase a page’s keyword density, including ALT tag stuffing.
Using hidden text or links.
Using techniques such as creating link farms to artificially increase the number of links to your page.

Also, in an e–mail announcing the second preview release of the new MSN search, Microsoft mentioned cloaking and having duplicate content on multiple domains as things that will lead your site to being penalized or removed from the MSN Search index.
How to Report Spam to MSN
To report search engine spam to MSN, use the form on their website.
Have you seen any search engine spam lately? Instead of submitting spam reports to each engine, you can also simply submit a spam report through SEOToolSetTM.

Even those who are spamming right now and think they are getting away with it, should keep one thing in mind, when competitors check out your site (and they do), they will see it is spam and they may choose to report you. Once you have been reported to a search engine, you are likely to be penalized in search engine results for using your spam technique.