Keywords Spamming

What is Keywords Spam or Keyword Spamming?

Keyword spam is the excessive repetition of keyword on a webpage nomatter where those keywords are used. It is knows as keyword spamming if excessive amount of keywords are used in meta tags or content or elsewhere on a page. Now what we think, SEO101 define keyword spam as a term given to the excessive addition of keywords or keyphrases to a webpage.

This could be accomplished through a variety of means ranging from simply repeating keyphrases in your body text to using CSS to hide text off the site of your page. It is usually done using ‘hidden’ elements that are indexed by search engines but are not visible to users including Title, Meta, and Alt. Black-hatters have found that they can disguise keywords in the contents of the page by making the text the same color as the background and tucking it away at the bottom of the page. However this still takes up space so may be noticed by competitors, particularly if they type CTRL-A to highlight all the text on a page. It is also possible for search engines to detect text which is the same color as the background and this could flag that the page is using spammy techniques. MSN Search claims to automatically penalize these pages.

An extension on the hidden text idea is to hide the keyword spam using style-sheets (CSS). This gives the spammer great scope for stuffing keywords into important elements such as Headings without them being noticed. The following style will format all Heading 1 text as 1pt high white text.

H1 {
font-size : 1pt;
color : white;
}

This can be used to insert keywords in header tags on white background but i can be easily detectable by search engines, so SEO101 don’t appreciate and recommand you to use these methods for keyword spamming.

There are many other ways of hiding content from users such as Layers and IFrames while still having it visible to search engines. Remember that it is possible to detect the most obvious examples of spam although forcing search engines to parse style sheets and other structures slows down indexing so few, if any, search engines currently do this.

The reality of business means that SEO services can be a substantial investment to make. There’s little point in making that investment if the work could cause damage at any time.

Keyword spamming is effectively designing pages for search engines. What eflaunt do is help you design your pages for the visitor of your site, while keeping search engines in mind.

Search engines can easily spot pages that repeat the same terms over and over again and will regularly penalise these sites. In cases where the repetition is more subtle and search engines can’t automatically recognise the keyword spam, there is still the danger that your competitors will report you for spamming.

Reporting Keyword Spam

If you spot a competitor using obviously spammy techniques you can report them. Google and Yahoo! have web pages that let you specify the exact nature of the problem you have found.

Google <http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html>

Yahoo! <http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_reportsearchspam>

Obviously they won’t ban sites where there is no contravention so don’t waste time reporting all your competitors. If you have any questing regarding keyword spamming, you can contact SEO101 for further details.

Tags: SEO, SEO101, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engine Submission, Search Engine Marketing, Keywords, Keyword Search, Link Popularity, Keyword Population, Keyword Density, Keyword Stuffing, Keyword Spam, Keyword Spamming, Keyword Optimization, Meta Tag Stuffing