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, including listing chosen keywords on a page in small-point font face the same color as the page background (rendering it invisible to humans but not search engine search engine spiders).

Search engine spammers are generally aware that the content that they promote is not very useful or relevant to the ordinary internet surfer. They try to use methods that will make the website appear above more relevant websites in the search engine listings.

Techniques
Here are some common spamdexing techniques:

Hidden or invisible text
Disguising keywords and phrases by making them the same (or almost the same) colour as the background, using a tiny font size or hiding them within the HTML code such as no frame sections, ALT attributes and no script sections. This is useful to make a page appear to be relevant in a way that makes it more likely to be found. Example: A promoter of a Ponzi scheme wants to attract web surfers to a site where he advertises his scam. He places hidden text appropriate for a fan page of a popular music group on his page hoping that the page will be listed as a fan site and receive many visits from music lovers.

Keyword stuffing (also known as keyword spamming)
Repeated use of a word to increase its frequency on a page. Older versions of indexing programs simply counted how often a keyword appeared, and used that to determine relevance levels. Most modern search engines have the ability to analyze a page for Keyword stuffing and determine whether the frequency is above a “normal” level.

Meta tag stuffing
Repeating keywords in the Meta tags more than once, and using keywords that are unrelated to the site’s content.

Hidden links
Putting links where visitors will not see them in order to increase link popularity.

Mirror websites
Hosting of multiple websites all with the same content but using different URL ’s. Some search engines give higher rank to results where the keyword searched for appears in the URL.

Gateway or doorway pages
Creating low-quality web pages that contain very little content but are instead stuffed with very similar key words and phrases. They are designed to rank highly within the search results. A doorway page will generally have “click here to enter” in the middle of it.

Page redirects
Taking the user to another page without his or her intervention, e.g. using META refresh tags, CGI scripts, Java, JavaScript, Server side redirects or server side techniques.

Cloaking
Sending to a search engine a version of a web page different from what web surfers see.

Code swapping
Optimizing a page for top ranking, then swapping another page in its place once a top ranking is achieved.

Link spamming
Link spam takes advantage of Google ’s PageRank algorithm, which gives a higher ranking to a website the more other websites link to it. A spammer may create multiple web sites at different domain names that all link to each other. Another technique is to take advantage of web applications such as weblogs and wikis that display hyperlinks submitted by anonymous or pseudonymous users. Link farms are another technique.

Referrer log spamming
When someone accesses a web page , i.e. the referee, by following a link from another web page, i.e. the referrer , the referee is given the address of the referrer by the person’s internet browser. Some websites have a referrer log which shows which pages link to that site. By having a robot randomly access many sites enough times, with a message or specific address given as the referrer, that message or internet address then appears in the referrer log of those sites that have referrer logs. Since some search engines base the importance of sites by the number of different sites linking to them, referrer log spam may be used to increase the search engine rankings of the spammer’s sites, by getting the referrer logs of many sites to link to them.
Spamdexing often gets confused with legitimate search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, which do not involve deceit.

Spamming involves getting web sites more exposure than they deserve for their keywords, leading to unsatisfactory search results. Optimization involves getting web sites the rank they deserve on the most targeted keywords, leading to satisfactory search experiences. To be sure, there is much gray area between the two extremes. The root problem is that search engine administrators and web site builders have different agendas: the search engine wants to present valuable search results, the webmaster just wants to come up first, particularly if he/she runs a commercial website and needs visitor Traffic from search engines and directories . For that reason, many search engine administrators say that any form of search engine optimization used to improve a website’s page rank is nothing else than spamdexing.

Many search engines check for instances of spamdexing and will remove suspect pages from their indexes.

Your goal then is to ensure that every element of your website persuades visitors on your site to take the actions that lead to the delivery of your objectives (conversion).

Unfortunately, many web pages are hurt by using layout templates that downgrade the prominence of the page’s primary content. Elaborate HTML tables used to create the page’s masthead and left navigation areas end up pushing the page’s content section - and therefore its keywords - far down in the file.

Just as seriously, web designers clutter the HEAD section of their documents with large sections of JavaScript code or embedded Cascading Style Sheets. While this code can be useful, it pushes your keywords even farther down in the HTML file.

Restructuring your layout tables to improve keyword prominence can be a real challenge and may force you to make design compromises. Fortunately, our New Year’s resolution involves something that’s much easier to address: those bloated JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets.

That’s good, because for many web pages these are the fattest components. I’ve seen HTML files that were 100 kilobytes in size, yet fully 60k of this was JavaScript code.

The prospect of changing your JavaScript code intimidates many people. If you’re like most webmasters, you don’t write your own JavaScript, but instead use a third-party script or script inserted by your HTML editor.

However, to slim down our pages we won’t actually change the content of our JavaScript. We will lift it intact and place it in an external file. Just be aware that when you place your JavaScript in an external file, you don’t need to surround the JavaScript code with SCRIPT tags. In fact doing this may keep your script from working properly.

Once you’ve moved your java code to a separate file, modify your main HTML page to reference the external JavaScript.

I’ve been thinking that perhaps some SEO experts, including me, have been over-analyzing everything, trying to come up with some sort of technique, trick, or magic formula that will take them straight to the top of search engines. I’ve been thinking that maybe sticking to the basics might be the ticket to the top of the mountain.

You may not even need to optimize your Web site for search engines. You can still get good rankings by just creating good content. Analyzing the competition takes a lot of time and effort. If you Keep It Simple & Silly (KISS) — you can use that time to develop better content, a better overall Web site for your visitors, and take some time out to enjoy life. Who knows, perhaps using the KISS principle will even make your pages immune to the dreaded algorithm change!

Until next time, remember to KISS your SEO!

~ Farooque