Did You know that SEO Spam can Harm Your Search Engine Rankings and even Destroy Your Internet Business?
SEO spam means using unethical search engine optimization techniques to gain higher rankings on SERPs. Many people know that unethical SEO techniques are bad idea and it’s suggested to avoid using them. Unfortunately, there are also many people who claim that “illegal” SEO techniques are not harmful at all and argue with other webmasters.
You should remember that any attempts to trick search engines in order to gain higher rankings will be treated as SEO spam and you should never adopt such techniques in your campaigns. Webmasters using spammy SEO techniques are unaware of the risks waiting for them.
Dangers of Using Unethical SEO Techniques
SEO spam can actually bring you high rankings for your chosen keywords. However, you should remember that such effect is temporary. You may enjoy your top position for a couple of days, weeks or even months, but as soon as search engines detect that you’re using illegal SEO techniques, they will ban your site from their index for a long time.
Your web site may be penalized and dropped for a couple of months or even years. In that case, it will be very hard to get back on-board again if ever possible at all. You may not be indexed, even if you remove all the bad SEO techniques and try to resubmit your website. In the worst case you’ll have to forget your existing, buy a new domain name and start all over again.
It’s very tough to be re-indexed if you’re caught using SEO spam. The dangers are huge. You should ask yourself if you’re ready to risk your website and your whole internet business in order to gain higher search engine rankings.
5 Unethical SEO Techniques
By now, you have discovered what SEO spam is and what dangers will be waiting for you if you decide to adopt these shady techniques in your campaigns. Now, it’s time to find out what those unethical SEO methods actually are. Here are 5 major SEO spam tactics that are not recommended to use by professional webmasters.
- Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing means using the same keywords in Your META tags or elsewhere in the content over and over again. This technique was recognized by SEs and web sites that use it are being penalized. It simply doesn’t work anymore and you shouldn’t use this technique too. - Hidden Text and Links
Search engines scan pages for keywords entered into a search query and show results where that keyword appears mostly on a page. Webmaster decided to insert some text or links that can be seen by search engines, but not by human eyes. For example placing white text and links with keywords into a page with a white background color. People couldn’t see the difference, but spiders could and ranked those sites higher. It doesn’t work anymore. - Doorway Pages
These are usually poor quality pages that are created to rank highly, specifically for one or more chosen keywords. They not benefit visitors, they’re created for search engines only. These pages may have exact or similar content that is copied from other sites. Doorway pages usually have no navigation menu, just a link to a main page. They may reside on the same, but mostly on other company’s server. - Cloaking
This method is used to deliver different pages for visitors and search engines. Webmasters configured their servers to recognize IP addresses of SE spiders and deliver them content rich, optimized pages, while showing absolutely different pages for human visitors. Cloaking may also redirect visitors to a home page. This technique is treated as spam and is not recommended to use. - Link Farms
Many companies use this method. It’s sole purpose to gain link popularity. A link farm is usually one page that consists of 50 to 100 or more links to websites that have nothing in common with the content of your site. Such pages have no benefit to users as they give links to sites that aren’t interesting to them. Link farms are being penalized by search engines.
Report Search Engine SPAM
Search engines want to provide the most relevant search results to the surfers. They work hard in developing new algorithms to stop SEO spam. Therefore, major search engines have given the ability to report search spam and help fighting with webmasters that adopt unethical SEO techniques.
If you find a web site using search engines and suspect it’s using spammy SEO methods, you can report that website to search engines. A couple of search spam report forms can be found at:
- Yahoo Search Spam Report
- Google Spam Result Report
SEO spammers are not doing any good to the web searchers. They abuse search results and do not provide quality content to their visitors. If you want to help search engines improve their ranking and filtering algorithms, take your time and report search spammers for all our sake.
In Conclusion
Remember that spamming a search engine is always a bad idea and should be avoided at all cost. Don’t try to trick search engines using shady SEO techniques. This will not only bring negative reactions by your visitors, but also will hurt your rankings badly. You may lose your domain name, your business and your reputation.
If you want to gain high rankings on search engines, think about your visitors first. Provide them quality information and try to make their experience on your web site as good as possible. Search engines will appreciate great and useful content and, in turn, will reward you with higher rankings.
