Sins of The Internet: Spamming Search Engines

It is common knowledge on the internet that the only significant way to get people to visit your website is by getting a good listing in the search engines. (This is a completely false concept, by the way. There are far better ways to get traffic, and these will be the subject of future columns).

With search engines it's critically important to get your site as close to the top of the listing as you can (this is called ranking). Let's say you have a site about asthma. What you would like is for your site to be first or second whenever someone searches on the keyword asthma. You certainly want to be no further down than the third page, since most people will stop scanning the listing after that.

The difference between being listed on the first page for a keyword and the second can be thousands (or tens of thousands) of hits per day. Further down than that, and the listing in the search engine becomes fairly useless.

The result of this fact is a competition (actually, it verges on a small scale war sometimes) to see who can get higher in the listings. There are experts who spend weeks coming up with the perfect pages to submit to search engines just to get that extra boost in the listings. When you consider that for a business site this can literally mean the difference between success and failure, you can understand. In my mind, it means people are spending less time on content and more time struggling with their rankings, which does nothing for their visitor's experience.

To make matters even more difficult, each search engine works differently.

• Some search engines examine just the text in your document
• Another looks at meta tags
• Still another looks at Meta tags and ALT tags on graphics
• Some of the major ones actually looks at the links to your site (and their "quality", whatever that means).

What this means is it can be very difficult to get a higher listing in the search engines. You really have to know your stuff and practically make it a sub-career just to stay even in this battle. Add to all of this the fact that the search engines are constantly changing their methods to throw off spammers, and you have a real interesting and frustrating situation.

A search engine spammer is essentially someone who is trying to cheat the system. He knows that he MUST get higher and he does not have the intelligence, ethics and time to do it honestly. So he tries to short circuit the rules.

A very common spammer technique is called "doorway pages". These are not always spam - it depends upon how they are created and their purpose. What is a doorway page? Let's say you have a site on xyz.com and you want a search engine to notice it. You submit the site and find that it gets lost in the listings. What you can do is create a hundred more pages on a hundred different sites (and free hosts were commonly used for this), each of which simply links back to your main site. You then submit each of those hundred pages, and viola, you have a hundred listings!

The worst type of doorway pages simply redirect you automatically to the main site. These are becoming more rare as time passes as this is very obvious to search engines and easy to drop out of the listings. Of course, it's perfectly legitimate to use redirection many times - say, to send people from your old site to your new site.

In fact, there are quite a few services on the internet which will charge you quite a bit of money to create doorway pages for you. They are not doing you any favors, by the way, as most of the major engines will drop you out of their listings faster than a hot potato if you get caught.

How can doorway pages be validly used? Easy. You could have a page with an article which is located on a free host which links to your main site. It's a doorway, but it's legitimate as it's purpose is not to spam the engines.

Another type of doorway that is legitimate is creating a separate entry page for each search engine. Since each engine uses different rules to rank your page, it makes sense to make a slightly different page for each one.

The search engines caught onto doorway pages a long time ago and they actually check to see if you've been doing this. They had to, as this is a common tactic of adult web sites. That's why for a couple of years just about everything in every search engine seemed to produce listings of adult web sites - they were overwhelmed with doorway pages.

Google is an unusual search engine in that they are not primarily concerned with your site to determine it's ranking. They are concerned with the quality of links to your site. I know what you are thinking - what the heck is quality of links? Well, let's say your site is about asthma. Google looks at your site and sees that you claim, in your metatags (a way to tell the search engine what your site is about), text and ALT tags, that your site is indeed about asthma.

Now Google looks at the links to your site to see how many of the text links have the word "asthma" in them. The theory behind this is actually quite sound. If your site is about asthma and it's any good, then other sites will want to link to your site. Very simple concept.

Believe it or not, some people have figured out how to spam this also. What they did was create a hundred other sites, each of which links back to the main site. The hundred other sites appear to be perfectly legitimate - in fact, if you didn't know better you would have a hard time figuring out this was a spamming technique.

Another common spamming technique is simply to steal things that work from the highly listed sites. This usually means swiping the metatags of those sites. There is some controversy as to whether or not metatags can be copyrighted. Those cases that seem to be standing up in court seem to revolve around the use of trademarks in metatags. For example, if you stole Home Depot's metatags for your own hardware site, you'd better remember to take "Home Depot" out of the metatags or you could be sued for trademark violation.

Of course, the simplest amateur spamming technique is to resubmit a site a zillion times. Guess what, the search engines will block your site entirely if you do this - it's a waste of everyone's time and resources.

There are many other techniques that people use to attempt to get higher listings in search engines. You should be careful, if you care about your ranking, to only use those techniques that validly cause your site to go higher. In other words, spend more time on content, metatags, ALT tags and getting links to your site and less on trying to cheat the system. You will do better in the long run.