Spamdexing – A Black Hat SEO Technique with Many Side Effects

Search engine optimizers consider adapting both unethical as well as ethical SEO techniques when it comes to increase the search engine visibility of their client’s websites with a higher search engine ranking. Most of the search engines set almost similar set of criteria and use a sophisticated algorithm to determine the search engine ranking of websites on the basis of their relevancy. However most of the site owners try to manipulate the ranking algorithm of search engines in their favor to grab the largest market share of referral traffic from search engines and spread their business further.

What is Spamdexing?

Spamdexing otherwise known as search spam or search engine spam is a black hat SEO technique which follows some unethical web optimization means like content spam, keyword spam, link spam and many more to improve the search engine relevancy or prominence of web resources by manipulating the search engine indexing system. It mainly uses illegal referencing techniques and methods in diverting traffic to a website.

Use of Spamdexing:-

Search engine ranking algorithms give maximum stress on link popularity, authority, relevance and keywords of websites while displaying them in organic search results in the order of relevance. Spamdexing is such a optimization mechanism that its powerful search engine indexing system manipulation features can make web traffic to land on an irrelevant site thereby pushing up its search engine ranking for a particular keyword. As a result the ranking of other spamming sites which keeps the link of this particular site also increase.

Different Forms of Spamdexing: -

There are countless ways of practicing spamdexing. Below is given a list of SEO methods which are found to be widely used but still come under spamdexing.
 Content Spam: - All the content spam techniques are meant for changing the logical view that a search engine has over webpage content. It includes the following techniques:
Keyword Stuffing
Meta Tag Stuffing
Hidden or Invisible Text
Gateway or doorway pages
Scraper sites

 Link Spam: - Link spam is nothing but techniques being followed to get back links for a site from other highly ranked websites only to get a higher ranking thereby influencing search engine’s link based ranking algorithm. It includes the following techniques:
Link Farms
Hidden Links
Sybil Attack
Spam Blogs
Page Hijacking
Cookie stuffing
Buying Expired Domains

 Mirror Websites: - It involves creation of multiple websites all with the same content but using different URLs with an intention to get higher search engine ranking.

 URL Redirection: - It uses META refresh tags, Flash, JavaScript, Java or Server side redirects to take the user to another page automatically.

 Cloaking: - Cloaking is an attempt to mislead search engines by serving them a page which is completely different from that of visitors.


Effect of Spamdexing on Long Run: -

Spamdexing may provide a boost to your site’s ranking on a temporary basis but it carries along with it the risk of your site being banned or penalized by search engines on being detected to use unethical or spammy SEO techniques for manipulating search engine index system. Today search engines are more vigilant to wipe out such web spam stuff in order to increase the quality of indexing system. One has to think many times before choosing the path of spamdexing otherwise search engines may throw away your site from their index list and can go to the extent of banning it.