Spamdexing

In digital marketing and online advertising, spamdexing (also known as search engine spam, search engine poisoning, black-hat search engine optimization (SEO), search spam or web spam) is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. It involves a number of methods, such as link building and repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevance or prominence of resources indexed, in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system.The problem arises when site operators load their Web pages with hundreds of extraneous terms so search engines will list them among legitimate addresses.The process is called 'spamdexing,' a combination of spamming — the Internet term for sending users unsolicited information — and 'indexing.' In digital marketing and online advertising, spamdexing (also known as search engine spam, search engine poisoning, black-hat search engine optimization (SEO), search spam or web spam) is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. It involves a number of methods, such as link building and repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevance or prominence of resources indexed, in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system. It could be considered to be a part of search engine optimization, though there are many search engine optimization methods that improve the quality and appearance of the content of web sites and serve content useful to many users. Search engines use a variety of algorithms to determine relevancy ranking. Some of these include determining whether the search term appears in the body text or URL of a web page. Many search engines check for instances of spamdexing and will remove suspect pages from their indexes. Also, search-engine operators can quickly block the results-listing from entire websites that use spamdexing, perhaps alerted by user complaints of false matches. The rise of spamdexing in the mid-1990s made the leading search engines of the time less useful. Using unethical methods to make websites rank higher in search engine results than they otherwise would is commonly referred to in the SEO (search engine optimization) industry as 'black-hat SEO'. These methods are more focused on breaking the search-engine-promotion rules and guidelines. In addition to this, the perpetrators run the risk of their websites being severely penalized by the Google Panda and Google Penguin search-results ranking algorithms. Common spamdexing techniques can be classified into two broad classes: content spam (or term spam) and link spam. The earliest known reference to the term spamdexing is by Eric Convey in his article 'Porn sneaks way back on Web,' The Boston Herald, May 22, 1996, where he said: Spamdexing is the practice of search engine spamming. It is a form of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) spamming, which is the art of making a website attractive to the major search engines for optimal indexing. Spamdexing is the practice of creating websites that will be illegitimately indexed with a high position in the search engines. Spamdexing is sometimes used to try and manipulate a search engine’s understanding of a category. The goal of a web designer is to create a web page that will find favorable rankings in the search engines, and they create their pages according to standards that they believe will help. Some of them resort to spamdexing, often unbeknownst to their clients. While spamdexing has interfered with the finding of information on the internet, measures have been taken to curb it with some success. These techniques involve altering the logical view that a search engine has over the page's contents. They all aim at variants of the vector space model for information retrieval on text collections. Keyword stuffing involves the calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword count, variety, and density of the page. This is useful to make a page appear to be relevant for a web crawler 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. 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 consistent with other sites created specifically to attract search engine traffic. Also, large webpages are truncated, so that massive dictionary lists cannot be indexed on a single webpage. Unrelated hidden text is disguised by making it the same color as the background, using a tiny font size, or hiding it within HTML code such as 'no frame' sections, alt attributes, zero-sized DIVs, and 'no script' sections. People screening websites for a search-engine company might temporarily or permanently block an entire website for having invisible text on some of its pages. However, hidden text is not always spamdexing: it can also be used to enhance accessibility.