What is Search Engine Spam?

Search engine spamming is the unethical practice for optimizing the site to rank it high on SERP. Spamming is used to trick search engines for higher rankings with the use of some tactics such as repetitive keywords, hidden text and links etc. All the search engines penalize the website that uses spam. Since time immemorial --or at least since the Internet first began-- webmasters have been using these stratagems to dupe search engines into giving irrelevant pages high search engine placement.

Each search engine's objective is to produce the most relevant results to its visitors. Producing the most relevant results for any particular search query is the determining factor of being a popular search engine. Every search engine measures relevancy according to its own algorithm, thereby producing a different set of results. Search engine spam occurs if anybody tries to artificially influence a search engine's basis of calculating relevancy.

Each of the major search engines provide specific guidelines describing what webmasters should and should not do to their web pages in order to achieve a better search engine ranking, though that has not always been the case.

There are overall sixteen tactics that are considered search engine spam. These techniques are

*Keywords unrelated to site
*Redirects
*Keyword stuffing
*Mirror/duplicate content
*Tiny Text
*Doorway pages
*Link Farms
*Cloaking
*Keyword stacking
*Gibberish
*Hidden text
*Domain Spam
*Hidden links
*Mini/micro-sites
*Page Swapping (bait &switch)
*Typo spam and cyber squatting

Not to be confused with the canned, processed meat, spam is the use of redundant or unethical techniques to improve search engine placement. Fortunately or unfortunately --depending on your point of view-- search engines are quickly catching on. Some won't index pages believed to contain spam; others will still index, but will rank the pages lower, while others still will ban a site altogether. Of course, not all search engines take a hard-line on spam. Tricks that are perfectly acceptable on one search engine may be considered spam by another.