Spamming
What would you do if a new client asked you to carry out black hat techniques in order to put his site to the top of the organic listings? It's a difficult one because often clients don't realise that the short term gains are not worth the trouble... unless that is they don't care about damaging their brand reputation. Generally speaking however it is best practice to optimise you site according to the suggestions provided by the search engines. By doing this you will build up your site's position over time and should the algorythms change your site will not be adversely affected.
Below is a list of alternative methods used by people to try and improve their position in the search engine rankings:
- Cloaking
This is where you serve up one page to the user and an entirely different page to the search engines. This is acheived by the web server scanning the incoming connection IP address. If the IP address matches that of a know search engine it will get a text rich page with heavily descriptive title tags, Meta tags and text copy. If the IP address is unrecognised it must belong to a user so the web server delivers the normal page, with graphics etc. If done correctly, cloaking is undetectable and the search engines will continue to receive text heavy pages.
You can also use the user agent string and then delivering content based on that alone, this is really easy to detect as it is simple to spoof your user agent and then detect the cloaking.
- Hidden text and links
Trying to hide text by placing it on a similar background is an old trick which will only temporarily improve your ranking. Some people even hide text and links behind invisable CSS divs or by using the Z index to hide the text off the page. Eventually the search engine spiders will catch up to you and your page will be moved down.
- Blog And Wiki spamming
Search engines place great importance on links that point to your website, so much so that people will place their text links anywhere just to increase their backlink count. An easy place to get links is via sites that have content updated on a regular basis, such as Blog sites. Blogs are content management sites that allow users to post thier thoughts on a site. One problem with the arrival of blogs is the arrival of blog spammers. These people run automated crawlers that hunt out blogs and then post hundreds of thousands of keyworded text. This tactic is quick and fast, but very short lived. Search engines can close down the benefits of the links with in a few months and even knock out the domain that the links are pointing to.
- Pagejacking
This is the latest and really evil method of spamming that exploits Google's short comings in the way it currently reads 302 redirects. If a page that has a 302 redirect to another site of a lower PR there is every chance that the page doing the redirecting will start to rank for the other pages keyphrases dependant on several other factors. Please view Webmasterworld pagejacking thread to find out more. This method is not recommended!
- Duplicating tags
Duplicating title tags and Meta tags is another old favourite but it does not give any real long term advantages in the search engines.
All of the tactics outlined above are different ways that you can gain traffic for your website that the search engines discourage,
All of the above methods are against search engine policy and therefore strongly discouraged. Whilst search engines are unlikely to act on manual spam submissions they modify their algorythmes from time to time in order to target the rougue sites. Rather than building a site that shoots up the listings but only lasts six months before being black listed build a site using the recommended best practices. Over time your site will climb up up the listings and stay there.