Steering Clear of Search Engine Spam - Link Farms and Misleading Content
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So what can we learn from all of these guidelines? Well, it’s a little confusing when you read them all at once. Fortunately, iProspect wrote a white paper last year titled “Search Marketer Beware: The Six SEM Tactics That Can Be Viewed as Spam.” While there are many things that have changed since that article was written, search engines apparently still treat these specific techniques as spam, if their guidelines about what to avoid are any indication.
So, using iProspect’s piece as a jumping-off point, and checking what the various search engines have to say about these approaches, here are the tactics you’d better not be using on your web site if you want to stay listed:
Link Farms: When Google came out with its new approach to search, it inspired the practice of link farms. Google’s initial algorithm put heavy weight on how many pages linked to you as an indication of the relevance of your site’s content. Plenty of legitimate sites try to get inbound links to improve their rankings. But this is one of those practices that, as I mentioned above, is bad when taken to extremes.
A link farm links to a large number of sites strictly to improve these sites’ popularity. Google specifically tells webmasters “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or ‘bad neighborhoods’ on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.” Yahoo doesn’t specifically mention link farms, but says it doesn’t approve of “Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site’s apparent popularity.” MSN does get specific, however, saying that one of the practices that could result in the removal of your site from its index is “Using techniques to artificially increase the number of links to your page, such as link farms.”
Misleading Content: This covers a wide range of practices. For example, I was recently doing research for a short piece on two-stage space launches that involved taking a rocket up 15 to 20 miles into the sky by balloon before it fired its engines to get the rest of the way into space. My keywords included “balloon” and “rocket,” among others. One of the sites that came up appeared to be relevant at first, but somehow when I clicked on the link I ended up at a dating site. Say what?!
If you’re trying to lure people to your site by using methods to score highly on popular keywords that only marginally have something to do with your content…stop it. Make sure your meta tags and title tags are optimized for phrases that are actually descriptive of your site’s content. Google specifically says “Don’t load pages with irrelevant words,” while Yahoo takes a more general approach, frowning on “Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent, or provide a poor user experience.” MSN also frowns on the use of irrelevant words.
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