The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
January 2005, Volume 4, Issue 1

Search Marketer Beware: The Six SEM Tactics That Can Be Viewed as Spam

by Heather Molina, Algorithmic Team Leader, iProspect

You might be thinking, “Which search engine marketing tactics could be considered spam?” or “I KNOW my search marketing techniques are not questionable.” But don’t speak too soon. You may unknowingly be a “passive” practitioner of search engine marketing strategies that the search engines frown upon.

As natural search engine optimization has become a more popular way to attract visitors to websites, competition for the top positions in search engines has become aggressive, as have the tactics to get a search engine’s algorithm to prefer one site over all others on specific keyword phrases. This natural progression is no surprise, and search engines (especially Google and Yahoo!) have done an excellent job keeping pace with the many workarounds devised to “fool” the natural search ranking process. Unfortunately, your website may be engaged in one or more of these tactics without you evening knowing it, thereby running the risk of being penalized by search engines as a result.

The most common SEM techniques websites engage in to artificially inflate rankings include:

Link Farms and Duplicated Link Pages - Websites that point back to your site help search engines determine how valuable your domain is on a given search term. Utilizing link farms (a Web page designed to link to a large number of sites strictly to boost their link popularity) and duplicated link pages (duplicating one or more Web pages with a link pointing to their main site and placing these pages on many different domains) are seen as artificial ways to boost a website’s popularity.

Misleading Content - Ever click on a search engine result expecting educational information on a disease but instead find yourself reading through a page selling a discounted version of the drug that treats the condition? The page you are looking at briefly touches on the topic you want information on, but the rest of the site doesn’t relate to the topic at all. The site is actually an online discounted drug store for a number of different drugs. This probably occurred because the site owner optimized the meta tags and title tags with the keyword phrase searched, which did not correspond to what the content of the page was about.

Keyword Stuffing - While it is an SEM best practice to integrate targeted keyword phrases into the content of a Web page, having too many occurrences of a keyword phrase on one page can be a problem. Having excessive repetitions of a keyword phrase can be viewed as overuse. A good rule of thumb in determining “overuse” is the number of times the keyword phrase appears within 200 words of content on the page. If the keyword phrase is mentioned more than six or seven times, this can be viewed as a questionable tactic.

Hidden or Invisible Text – This tactic involves placing text on a page that is the same color as the background, thus camouflaging it from a visitor’s view. While this text is hidden to users, it is not hidden to search engine spiders, which consider it when indexing and ranking the page.

Below is an example of hidden text from an Italian children’s clothing website. You’ll notice in the first screen shot of the home page that everything looks fine. But when a mouse is used to highlight the images on the page in the second screen shot, keywords magically (not really) appear in the white space at the top of the page.

Home Page Before Highlighting

Home Page After Highlighting

Vanity Domains (Mirror Sites) – This tactic involves making multiple copies of one main website and housing the exact same content as this official domain on multiple servers with different domain names. The goal of this is to achieve multiple rankings on the same keywords using the same (duplicate) content.

Doorway Pages/Deceptive Redirects - Doorway pages are pages that are optimized for one keyword phrase but don’t provide content on the topic. Typically, when a doorway page is used, a Web page is built to achieve high rankings on one keyword phrase and then leads the user to another page that has nothing or little to do with the searched topic. These pages may have an automatic refresh (deceptive redirect) to the second website.

If you are engaging in these types of strategies, it is critical that you stop now. At some point in your SEM campaign, your vendor should provide you with an audit of your site that looks for potential spam practices you may be unaware you are using. The beginning of an SEM campaign is usually the best time to do this.

Also, auditing both your online and offline competitors for questionable SEM practices should occur regularly. When you find a competitor to be violating the natural search process with these types of techniques you or your vendor must report them to the search engines using the links below.

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

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

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The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article: January 2005, Volume 4, Issue 1

Search Marketer Beware: The Six SEM Tactics That Can Be Viewed as Spam

The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
January 2005, Volume 4, Issue 1