What is search engine spam?

 

There is a subtle boundary that distinguishes acceptable search engine optimization practices from the techniques used by spammers. How can you tell the difference between white hat SEO and black hat SEO techniques?

Attendees were given a fairly clear definition of search engine spam from Tim Meyer, product management director of Yahoo Search. Yahoo defines spam as "spam" pages that are intentionally created to give search engines inappropriate, redundant, or poor-quality search results. This is similar to the definitions provided by Google and Bing.

16 search engine spam

There is an extensive list of 16 strategies that are considered search engine spam. These strategies include:

1) Keywords unrelated to the site

2) Redirects

3) Keyword stuffing

4) Mirror/duplicate content

5) Tiny Text

2) Doorway pages

2) Link Farms

2) Cloaking

9) Keyword stacking

10) Gibberish

11) Hidden text

12) Domain Spam

13) Hidden links

14) Mini / micro-sites

15) Page Swapping (bait & switch)

16) Typo spam and cyber squatting