Spamdexing
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Spamdexing or search engine spamming is the practice of deliberately creating web pages which will be indexed by search engines in order to increase the chance of a website or page being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned.
This is Blackhat SEO. Many designers of web pages try to get a good ranking in search engines and design their pages accordingly. Spamdexing refers exclusively to practices that are dishonest and mislead search and indexing programs to give a page a ranking it does not deserve.
"White hat" techniques for making a website indexable by search engines, without misleading the indexing process, are known as search engine optimization (SEO). White hat SEO techniques do not involve deceit.
Search engine spammers, on the other hand, are generally aware that the content that they promote is not very useful or relevant to the ordinary internet surfer and practice Blackhat SEO.
Search engines use a variety of algorithms to determine relevancy ranking. Some of these include determining whether the search term appears in the META keywords tag, others whether the search term appears in the body text of a web page . A variety of techniques are used to spamdex.
You can find a number of them here Many search engines check for instances of spamdexing and will remove suspect pages from their indexes. Blackhat SEO sites are short lived.
The rise of Blackhat SEO in the mid- 1990s made the leading search engines of the time less useful, and the success of Google at both producing better search results and combating keyword spamming, through its reputation-based PageRank link analysis system, helped it become the dominant search site late in the decade, where it remains. While it has not been rendered useless by blackhat SEO, Google has not been immune to more sophisticated methods either.
Practitioners of Blackhat SEO may act as consultants, to help other web publishers drive up their sites' ranks using black-hat techniques. Alternatively, they may set up sites of their own that benefit from misleadingly-high rankings -- for instance, creating thousands or millions of landing pages containing links for which the spammer earns a commission whenever the user clicks.
You can recognize most Blackhat SEO pages just by the fact that the content has little to do with what you were looking for.
Many of them will have nonsensical names or include numbers, like xxcgkz.com/?q=online-casino-games or xxhttp://1286.08tpv4.yi.org/ (I added the xx so the link can't be clicked through. If you want to see these sites you need to copy the link into your browser and take out the xx)
Blackhat SEO is unfair to newer webmasters because it litters the search engines so badly with sites that have no relevance to the given search that new sites have no way to move up.
Blackhat SEO also hurts smaller established sites by stealing their content, or linking to them so massively that the search engines penalize them, or all kinds of other clandestine activities. You can find some of them described here; http://www.gamesandcasino.com/affiliate/articles.htm
The search engines are always fighting back, removing black hat sites and developing algorithms that filter these sites out. Great caution is needed however to avoid catching innocents in the net.
If you find Blackhat sites, please help clean up the search results. Report them here:
Google reports: http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
Ban IPs on this list to avoid content spam: http://www.gearhack.com/Articles/FightSpam/
These are just a few tools we can use to fight Black hat SEO.
Lets all stick together!
