Zoekmachine Spam

    De term SPAM stamt af van een bedrijfsnaam die ingeblikt vlees produceerde. Maar vandaag de dag wordt SPAM gebruikt als term voor ongewenste berichten. Spam is ook bekend als Unsolicited Commercial E-mail en Unsolicited Bulk E-mail. Meestal wordt met de term ongewenste mail bedoeld, maar ook ongewenste reclameboodschappen op websites (oa. fora) vallen onder spam. Spam is moeilijk te definiëren. Niet ieder initiatief van mensen of organisaties om contact te leggen is spam. Spam onderscheidt zich van andere vormen van commerciële communicatie doordat een bericht wordt gestuurd aan een groep die zeer veel groter is dan de potentiële doelgroep.

    Er zijn vele soorten van elektronische spam. Enkele voorbeelden: email spam, mobiletelefoon spam, chat spam, forum spam en blog spam. Met de hulp van e-mails kan SPAM verzonden worden in de vorm van advertenties. De geadresseerde heeft de SPAMMER geen toestemming gegeven om hem of haar berichten te sturen met een commerciële boodschap.

    In terms of the handy devices known as mobile phones, spam can be massive amounts of text messages, which can alternatively be called junk text. In web services or features like blogs, forums, and chat rooms, spam may be received as repetitive reminders to click on links or advertisements.

    As reported by Search Engine Watch, spam has become the usual practice of many SEO firms and sites, by tricking search engines and web users into getting a site’s ranks up, even if content is totally irrelevant and inappropriate. From this site, they also mentioned that Google, MSN, and Yahoo mutually share the same thoughts on the definition of search engine spam.

    In general, search engine spam falls under the practices called Black Hat SEO. Two of the most common practices are gateway or doorway pages and mirrors sites, which may also be called duplicate sites. These two Black Hat SEO practices are to be discussed further in this chapter.

    According to Search Engine Watch, there are many other techniques that find their way into the electronic spam category. Following are a few short descriptions on the additional spamming practices that search engines are very vigilant against.

    These styles of search engine spam were presented by Shari Thurow of GrantasticDesigns.com, at the Search Engine Strategies Conference held in 2004 in Chicago City.

    Keyword stuffing is a way to bribe search engine spiders into indexing a site, simply because all the goodies or keywords are jam packed into it. You can think of keywords as one of the most delicious spider food around, and when Black Hat SEO is the technique of choice, these sites repetitively place in as many keywords as they can into the site.

    When they do this, they exceed a keyword density as recommended by major search engines and directories. Furthermore, the web visitor will be at a loss, since he will only be tricked into entering a site that has no important content to offer.

    Alternatively, keyword stuffing may also mean keyword stacking. In this method, the content of the site is practically gibberish, with nothing but phrases or keywords placed all over it.

    Another practice that is highly non-recommended is the creation of link farms. As mentioned in previous chapters already, spiders and bots of search engines come across other sites by following links that they have crawled previously.

    Link farms means that a certain site is stuffed with links, often unrelated and of unsorted categories. Sometimes, the links that are found in these link farms are from sites that have agreed upon having their URL included, just so they can have an edge for search engine rankings.

    Hidden links and hidden texts are additional notorious acts on the search engine watch lists. Basically, the principle behind hidden items on sites is that they are meant to lure in spiders and bots, but are generally not meant for the web visitor to see.

    How can these hidden links be used? In some way, there are sites that place links behind graphics or photos. This tricks the spiders to follow that link to index another site.

    Hidden text is usually in the form of several keywords or key phrases that are juxtaposed and repetitively placed on the site. The user won’t be able to see this gibberish because the text may be in the same color as the background, or also hidden behind graphics and image files. In the same way as hidden links, hidden text is a method of fooling search engine bots into indexing your site because of its keyword richness.

Cloaking is a general term for the practice of creating content that is not intended for the web visitor to view, but for search engine spiders only. Or in some cases, what the web user sees is very different from what the search engine spiders see.

    As discussed in Yahoo, Google, and MSN search engine guidelines, cloaking is a big no-no, and can definitely get a site penalized or even totally banned from search engines listings. According to Wikipedia, when search engines used to be easier to fool, cloaking was done to lure search engine users into entering a site, with content that is not useful to them, such as pornography, and many others.

    Today, major search engines are more aware of such practices on cloaking, electronic spam, and others. Thanks to spam reports by users and the improvement of search engine technology, these types of sites are no longer easily included in rankings. If you come across sites with such practices on search engine spam, you will learn about reporting them in the following sections of this chapter.

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