SEO: What’s Spam?
When you think of “spam,” as it involves online business, the mind traditionally flies to email. Unsolicited bulk email or UBE is most definitely spam. In this case, the recipient never agreed to receive email from the sender, and it goes against the CAN SPAM act of 2003.
But some websites are classified as SPAM websites by search engines, as well, and this is where SEO comes in. There are definite practices that you want to avoid so that you aren’t penalized. And you will be… it’s only a matter of time.
Not only are search spiders very smart and pick this stuff up pretty readily, there are human editors out there policing these things so that the search results returned by their search engines aren’t all the same, crappy stuff that nobody really wants to see. The site in question is flagged and a real, honest-to-goodness person just comes in and nukes you right off the face of their planet…
And rightly so.
But did you know that you can also be reported by casual surfers? Yep. People who have no connection to you, your site, or your business can see something they don’t like and just report your ass to the search engine. You totally don’t want that.
So, what should you avoid? Linking schemes where you have a bunch of crappy sites that exist only for the purpose of linking back to a money page. Or, it could be paid linking. Or, it could be a you link to my site, I link to his, she links back to me kind of thing. That’s probably the hardest to detect, but it’s still considered bad form by search engines.
They want everything to be “natural.” So, if she’s linking back to you… it’s only because she likes your site and wants to tell people about it, as it enhances her visitors’ experience… not for the purpose of giving you link juice and getting it back from someone else.
Hidden text can get you banned, though most folks know better than to even try that. Spiders read behind your page, so it doesn’t do a hoot of good to hide a bunch of keywords in same-color text as the background. That’s a pretty dumb kind of newbie mistake.
And they don’t like blatant tries at SEO on a page. For example, stuffing your page with keywords and linking to one site every time it is used isn’t considered good form, either… don’t do it.
I’m frustrated by people that expect instant results from SEO. They settle on practices that may work in the short term, but that will get their asses kicked out of places they can really benefit from. I mean, who doesn’t want free, targeted search engine traffic? It may take a while to set up, but once it’s done, things just take over naturally. It’s so worth it!
These points were all brought up in a great article over at Bing’s blog last week in a post entitled: “Eggs, bacon, spam, spam, and spam (SEM 101)” by Rick DeJarnette. Worth a read… and very good advice. If you think Bing is onto this, imagine what Google thinks. They’re like search Nazis, so be careful with what you do and don’t think that something that works really well today won’t hurt you tomorrow.
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- http://www.trafficstarterpro.com Wayne Sharer
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