When most people hear the word spam, they immediately think of those annoying emails offering the most weird and wonderful stuff that land in our email accounts. It infuriates most people and we cannot get rid of spam mail fast enough. Search engines may not be human, but trying to spam them incurs you the wrath of the search engines nevertheless.

Spamming the SEs is basically manipulation to influence the web spiders. It is boosting the ranking of a web page in an artificial way in the search results pages. Not a very good idea; trying to hoodwink the search engine spiders buy you a world of trouble.

Is it spam or is it not?

There is not a spam list set in stone that is used by each search engine, every search engine defines spamming in its own way and decide what that search engine considers as spam. There is a global agreement amongst the search engine professionals though on what is broadly perceived as spam. To have a clear picture of what each search engine considers spam, they have plainly understandable guidelines published on their information pages. The guidelines specifically warn against the use of mirror sites, doorway pages and hidden text. These are the most common tactics used by website owners.

You WILL get caught

No online business can afford the devastation that comes with having their website banned by any of the big search engines. You may get away with black hat tactics for a short while, but you will be found out, that is simple fact. Use of mirror sites will get your mirror sites excluded from search engine indexes and most probably banned.

If you have any mirror sites inside your website, lose them fast, it is simply not worth the trouble getting yourself banned. If you are making use of complete mirror sites, chuck them all. Keep only your focal website.  No matter how clever you think you are by using different sets of keyword phrases. Your doorway pages will be discovered. You do not fool the web crawlers for long with any hidden text slipped onto your website pages either. Get rid of it before you are found out. Search engines are far less forgiven than any humans.

Be smart and keep your nose clean

Whether you are a newbie on the online marketing scene or a veteran, ignorance of search engines is no excuse and will get you nowhere. Sit yourself down and go visit the official websites of each of the major search engines. Make a careful and thorough study of their statements of acceptable practices. The only way to keep your website clean and acceptable to the search engines is to know exactly what is allowed and what is not.

If you are not up to date with this, you can easily fall into the trap of being labelled as a spamming website. The consequences will range from having your site incorrectly indexed to start off with. Then your rankings will fall away fast and in the end you could have your website banned. In the end it is simply not worth it to risk losing everything.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Search Engine Optimisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.