“Why is Spamming is Not a Good Black-Hat SEO Technique?“
You shouldn’t even ask that question =P. For one thing, it’s BLACK HAT! For other, well, let me first ‘introduce’ to you why people spam .
Perhaps very few things can illustrate ‘fierce’ competition as vividly as the “Web” and SEO. After all, how can one website compete with thousands of other websites ‘just like itself’–without any search engine optimization?
If the attention span of an average Internet user is as expansive as a search engine’s listing, then there’s nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, though, that is not the case. Very likely, a person conducting a search on the Internet will probably just browse through the top 3 to 5 SERPs (search engine results pages) and stop there. Website that get buried in the 10th page and onwards will probably not get too much attention if certain measures are not undertaken.
Those measures, of course, are search engine optimization (SEO). Experts in this field perform certain procedures which may be seen a “website boot camp” to get your website into fighting form that will compete in the top rankings of a search engine.
However, as it is with almost everything else, some shortcuts exist that are able to “cheat” search engines into placing a particular website at a high ranking, despite the fact that it offers no real information. These sets of shortcuts are called “spamming”.
SEO spam (spamming the search engine index or spamdexing) is a set of ‘black-hat’ SEO techniques that manipulate a website for the purpose of creating an unrealistic boost in its rankings on SERPs. Here are just some examples of black-hat SEO techniques used to spam the living heck out of the search engines. (Warning: Do not do this on your web-estate or any where!)
Black-Hat SEO Technique 1. Cloaking
When a website presents a set of information to a search engine different from a set the user is seeing, then cloaking has been done. What usually happens is that the web page’s code is relevant to the user’s search keywords, but when the user visits that particular web page, he user sees a document that has little or nothing to do with his search.
Black-Hat SEO Technique 2. Artificially Networked Sites
There is really nothing wrong with creating links between one site to another so long as the links are relevant and serve to connect useful information.
However, spammers who perform this black-hat SEO technique set up several web sites and link them together even the sites contain no real and useful information. The purpose for doing so is simply to create the illusion of a highly referenced site because of its density of links. If this is the case, then it can be considered spamming.
Black-Hat SEO Technique 3. Blog and Forum Spams
Online blogs and forums are a great source of information since it these formats are built to be updated within short intervals. This, in itself, what makes it a good reference for information, which is why search engines like to visit these sites and rank it well for the quality of information it holds.
However, spammers have taken advantage of this by flooding blogs and forums with irrelevant links to the websites they want to generate artificial ranking for. Not only are they cheating the search engine company by misleading a user to irrelevant information, they also interrupt the bloggers and the forum participants, which is downright rude.
Black-Hat SEO Technique 4. Hidden Text.
Similar to cloaking, hidden texts are meant to make search engines think that a page is about one thing, while it is actually about another. But it fools the search engine this way: the text that the search engine is able to reads is camouflaged by making the text font color the same as the background. What happens is that the user is unable to read what the search engine saw, and therefore may be looking at a document that is not related to the user’s search.
There are other black-hat techniques, too, but I don’t want to give you any wrong impression. O.K. O.K. Some other techniques are to create small, imperceptible links that a user can accidentally click on, thus generating more hits for a website even if the user had no intentions of visiting that site at all.
O.K. I hope you’re happy with ’some’ of those black-hat SEO techniques (not all of them!?! :) .
Anyway, by this time, you probably already know why people are spamming. It is basically a shortcut used by some “unscrupulous” website owners to make their website rank high on SERPs (with a high potential of getting their sites BANNED in the future by the search engines), or by some self-proclaimed SEO experts who use these spammy black-hat SEO techniques to get the arms and legs of their customers for doing little to no work : .
Now that you know who they are, and how they do it, here’s why you should not be tempted to the dark side and use these black-hat techniques for nothing than spamming:
- The whole point of the Internet was to create a wealth of information that everyone can access and add to. The whole idea was to be able to create a place where information can be created and shared with others so that it can foster understanding without any physical boundary. Other results of this information have led to the development e-commerce and online businesses, which in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. It still contributes to a community of information and sharing.
- Spamming is fundamentally profiting at someone else’s expense. A spammer profits by using other people to make his website rank higher than others without taking the necessary time and effort to make his website useful and relevant as what others have done.
- It speaks poorly of website owners who see nothing but their own bottom lines in using the Internet. It is basically exploiting the trust and the willingness to share, which made the Internet such a promising venue for everyone.
- Finally, it demeans honest ‘white-hat’ SEO experts (like me :) ) who take the time and effort to produce quality website and make it a point to follow the rules. Search engine marketing is helping to level the playing field so it can allow businesses of any to advertise right along side each other. And that is a commendable thing, which everyone should gladly support.
- Note to the spammers/black-hat SEOers: search engines, with billions of dollars at their disposal, are ALWAYS developing smarter technologies to detect spamming and black-hat SEO techniques in order to give users the best list of information from the Internet. Eventually, the black-hat/spamming techniques mentioned above may be eliminated. (Unfortunately, it is very likely other more sophisticated ones will come up).
On your part, you can report spammers to these search engines when you encounter them. The more people like you who do this, the easier it will be to apprehe.
1 comments:
Yes indeed! Spamming is not good in terms of SEO technique because if you do this you're just saying that search engines are fool that can't trace the source of the backlink. Anyway, thanks for his important reminder.
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