I thought I would follow on directly from yesterday and expand on some other techniques to watch out for, techniques that if you are caught practicing will do serious harm to your site and business. Even if you can game the algorithms you will not be able to dodge the manual view once a webmaster reports your site.
I’ll echo what I said yesterday and that is “I am making you aware of these techniques so you can prevent them from being used, not to teach you how to use them”
So let’s take a look at some of the more intricate spamming techniques and as I said it is not quite clear yet whether or not search spiders can detect these or not. My guess is probably not considering the amount of spam in Google’s indexes. Remember the sole purpose of spamming is to attain a higher ranking, not to provide unique quality content to the end user.
Eventually all black hat techniques get found out and make up a terrible SEO strategy for long term success.
Mass Publishing Empires
This is an extremely common source of spam used by some of the biggest companies on the net. Businesses will set up various information sites that they have full control of and own. They will then link thousands of these sites together which will also be closely related in theme. All done for the purpose of producing high amounts of link juice. Remember it is only spam when a company is doing it to game the spiders and not a company who is branching out in different areas.
This is extremely difficult to highlight and to my knowledge search engines are having trouble cracking this one. However I firmly believe it will one day be put to rest as the concept of it undermines the whole purpose of “the most relevant results.”
Many spammers use this technique to gain high rankings on the most competitive keywords and is used by some of the most powerful companies on the net.
Wiki, blogs and Forums
“Wiki” stands for different sorts of public content management with the most common being wikipedia. They can be a great way to present new ideas and knowledge on a particular area and can be edited by users around the world.
Some search spammers use these sites as a platform for gaining links and enjoy the benefits of a high ranking backlink until another ‘just’ webmaster removes it. (To my knowledge “wikipedia” no longer follow links)
“blog” is an abbreviation of Weblog and again is a type of content management system (like this site). Blogs are a great source of expert advice and information. They are perfect for info hungry searchers and rank well within the search engines due to regularly updated info. They are also used as promotional tools to promote products and services.
The problem has been that spammers have jumped onboard the blog wagon and have created masses of related blogs all in an attempt to create link juice and push their sales sites to the top of the rankings. This is something Google are cracking down on but still remains a problem. I only hope Google do not stop indexing blogs altogether.
Blogs are also used to link spam through comments with special software being able to process thousands of comments everyday and fill related blogs with comments that add little to the topic but simply gain a backlink. Is it any wonder most blogs are no follow?
Forums are another type of information/discussion sites where spammers can be found in abundance. Again you will see the same types of spam comment typically “thanks for the advice” or a popular favourite a year ago was “just being roaming around this thread I like the ideas” it’s quite funny but they were there simply to benefit from a link.
In my view none of these are a long term SEO strategy and should only be used productively to increase exposure to you rexpertise.
Page Generation & Cloaking
A web server is capable of producing different web pages according to the referrer of any page request. For example the IP addresses of search engine spiders are well known and it is possible to implement a dynamic server side script which detects this IP address and serves up a highly optimised page, whilst a regular visitor will see a completely different page often littered with affiliate products or ads.
This practice is also known as cloaking.
Another and less common use of cloaking is to load a site in response to a spiders request with hundreds or thousands of dynamic URL addresses also known as phantom pages. These act as affiliate links to other websites. Spiders made themselves vulnerable to this type of spamming when making the decision to spider dynamic URL’s.
DHTML Spamming
DHTML simply stands for dynamic html. All the dynamics are purely browser side and involves the advanced use of CSS and JavaScript which allow interaction with visitors.
DHTML allows you to visually organise content into many different layers, one layer above the other. This type of spamming is used to hide loads of keywords beneath graphics. One layer covers the next, yet the text hidden deep below is still fully readable to search engine spiders. This type of cloaking is highly illegal yet search engines have not yet caught up with the spammers.
Machine Generated Content
This is a very simple and popular trick and consists of automatically producing hundreds if not thousands of keyword rich pages. The content is simply shuffled to make it appear different between pages and unique title tags are given to each page template.
You will find a lot of e-commerce sites using this technique, especially those with a limited selection of goods. The goods and information are simply shuffled around on a regular basis to make it appear new and fresh, however you are still looking at the same pages. It is possible to create a computer program to do this but as always I recommend against it as it is potentially dangerous to your site.
I’ll echo what I said yesterday and that is “I am making you aware of these techniques so you can prevent them from being used, not to teach you how to use them”
So let’s take a look at some of the more intricate spamming techniques and as I said it is not quite clear yet whether or not search spiders can detect these or not. My guess is probably not considering the amount of spam in Google’s indexes. Remember the sole purpose of spamming is to attain a higher ranking, not to provide unique quality content to the end user.
Eventually all black hat techniques get found out and make up a terrible SEO strategy for long term success.
Mass Publishing Empires
This is an extremely common source of spam used by some of the biggest companies on the net. Businesses will set up various information sites that they have full control of and own. They will then link thousands of these sites together which will also be closely related in theme. All done for the purpose of producing high amounts of link juice. Remember it is only spam when a company is doing it to game the spiders and not a company who is branching out in different areas.
This is extremely difficult to highlight and to my knowledge search engines are having trouble cracking this one. However I firmly believe it will one day be put to rest as the concept of it undermines the whole purpose of “the most relevant results.”
Many spammers use this technique to gain high rankings on the most competitive keywords and is used by some of the most powerful companies on the net.
Wiki, blogs and Forums
“Wiki” stands for different sorts of public content management with the most common being wikipedia. They can be a great way to present new ideas and knowledge on a particular area and can be edited by users around the world.
Some search spammers use these sites as a platform for gaining links and enjoy the benefits of a high ranking backlink until another ‘just’ webmaster removes it. (To my knowledge “wikipedia” no longer follow links)
“blog” is an abbreviation of Weblog and again is a type of content management system (like this site). Blogs are a great source of expert advice and information. They are perfect for info hungry searchers and rank well within the search engines due to regularly updated info. They are also used as promotional tools to promote products and services.
The problem has been that spammers have jumped onboard the blog wagon and have created masses of related blogs all in an attempt to create link juice and push their sales sites to the top of the rankings. This is something Google are cracking down on but still remains a problem. I only hope Google do not stop indexing blogs altogether.
Blogs are also used to link spam through comments with special software being able to process thousands of comments everyday and fill related blogs with comments that add little to the topic but simply gain a backlink. Is it any wonder most blogs are no follow?
Forums are another type of information/discussion sites where spammers can be found in abundance. Again you will see the same types of spam comment typically “thanks for the advice” or a popular favourite a year ago was “just being roaming around this thread I like the ideas” it’s quite funny but they were there simply to benefit from a link.
In my view none of these are a long term SEO strategy and should only be used productively to increase exposure to you rexpertise.
Page Generation & Cloaking
A web server is capable of producing different web pages according to the referrer of any page request. For example the IP addresses of search engine spiders are well known and it is possible to implement a dynamic server side script which detects this IP address and serves up a highly optimised page, whilst a regular visitor will see a completely different page often littered with affiliate products or ads.
This practice is also known as cloaking.
Another and less common use of cloaking is to load a site in response to a spiders request with hundreds or thousands of dynamic URL addresses also known as phantom pages. These act as affiliate links to other websites. Spiders made themselves vulnerable to this type of spamming when making the decision to spider dynamic URL’s.
DHTML Spamming
DHTML simply stands for dynamic html. All the dynamics are purely browser side and involves the advanced use of CSS and JavaScript which allow interaction with visitors.
DHTML allows you to visually organise content into many different layers, one layer above the other. This type of spamming is used to hide loads of keywords beneath graphics. One layer covers the next, yet the text hidden deep below is still fully readable to search engine spiders. This type of cloaking is highly illegal yet search engines have not yet caught up with the spammers.
Machine Generated Content
This is a very simple and popular trick and consists of automatically producing hundreds if not thousands of keyword rich pages. The content is simply shuffled to make it appear different between pages and unique title tags are given to each page template.
You will find a lot of e-commerce sites using this technique, especially those with a limited selection of goods. The goods and information are simply shuffled around on a regular basis to make it appear new and fresh, however you are still looking at the same pages. It is possible to create a computer program to do this but as always I recommend against it as it is potentially dangerous to your site.
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