What do you mean by Spamdexing?
Suppose you want to increase your rankings in search. And you come across tactics like link exchange, article spinning, and buying expired domains.
When you implemented them, instead of improving your rankings, your site got removed from the search.
And you wonder what have you done? This post will answer your question.
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Too Long; Didn’t Read
Spamdexing refers to the practices that manipulate search engines to rank higher in SERPs. These tactics can be divided into content spam and link spam. Examples include hidden text, scraper content, PBN, Link farming, UGC spam, and more.
What is Spamdexing?
Spamdexing or SEO spam is the deliberate manipulation of the search engine to rank pages higher.
In simple words, any effort that helps to manipulate rankings can be classified under spamdexing. These tactics violate Google’s webmaster guidelines and hence, can be classified as black hat tactics.
It is also known as search engine spam, search engine poisoning, search spam, SEO spam, or web spam.
Google combat SEO spam by rolling out SpamBrain, which is their “AI-based spam-prevention system”. Google said this system helps them find 200X more spam sites.
What are the Types of Spamdexing?
Spamdexing can be divided into two categories – Content spam and Link spam.
Let’s learn about each of these.
- Content Spam: This type of spam involves manipulating the content to rank higher. These practices violate the Google Search Essentials guidelines and are unethical. Let’s look at what content spam includes.
- Keyword Stuffing: It is a practice that involves the repetition of a single keyword over and over again in the copy to manipulate the rankings. According to Google, “Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results.” Google used to emphasize the keywords contained in the copy and this led to people doing keyword stuffing. But this tactic doesn’t work these days.
- Hidden text: The practice of hiding text from users but making it visible for crawlers to manipulate rankings. This is done by using white text on a white background or changing the opacity or font size of the text.
- Scraper Content: This is the practice of stealing content from one site (often a reputable site) and publishing it on another site without permission or citing the source. The content could be copied word for word, or by changing synonyms or using AI techniques to rephrase (paraphrasing) it and publishing on other websites.
- Article Spinning: The practice creates new content from existing content by changing words, phrases, and synonyms, and by using grammatical tricks. This comes under automatically generated content. The content created through this feels like new content and often passes plagiarism tests, but lacks personal touch and authenticity. And it can create duplicate content issues.
- Doorway page: These are pages or sites which are created to rank for similar queries. These pages dont provide much value to the users, they only exist to boost the rankings.
- Cloaking: The practice of showing different pages to search engines and users. The goal is to mislead the users and manipulate the rankings.
- Link Spam: This type of spam involves manipulating link building (backlinks) to rank higher. Following are the part of link spam:
- Link farms: These consist of different websites that link to each other in hopes of improving SEO rankings. These farms can be created manually or through automated software. The distinguishing factor of a link farm is that all the sites link to each other and not outside of the link farm.
- Private Blog Networks (PBN): These are the group(s) of sites created solely to boost rankings. These website (s) can be owned by a single individual or an organization.
- Guest blog spam: This spam involves creating a lot of low-quality guest posts on irrelevant sites for creating a lot of backlinks and boosting the rankings.
- UGC spam: The User Generated Content spam involves building links through the UGC platforms. For example, social media, forms, images, and more. Artificially creating links can be seen as spam and goes against Google Guidelines. UGC Spam can be done manually or through automated tools
- Link Exchange: This tactic involves two websites agreeing to link to each other for increasing rankings. This is like “You link to me and I will link to you. It’s also called reciprocal link building.
- Buying Expired Domains: This is a practice of buying expired domains solely for link building and using its domain authority to boost other sites’ rankings.
- Website hacking/link injection: Link injection is a technique where spammers add links to your website without your consent by hacking into the website. It is done because making a lot of links will help the spammer promote their other websites and boost their rankings.
Example of Spamdexing
Examples of spamdexing can range from keyword stuffing to buying links, and doing practices like doorway pages and cloaking to manipulate Google search bots and rankings.
Let me give you some examples:
Suppose you are trying to increase your ranking but the industry you are in is very competitive.
So you made a strategy of doing unethical practices like building PBNs and link farms.
These will increase your backlinks. You took articles from your competitor and spinned them to create new content. And created doorway pages to trick users.
This strategy can be a great one in the parallel universe but here, it can do more harm than good. Google can penalize your site by dropping your rankings.
What is the Purpose of Spamdexing?
The primary purpose of Spamdexing or SEO spam is to increase the rankings of a page by doing unethical practices.
Search Engine spam consists of wrong practices like keyword stuffing, article spinning, UGC spam, and more.
These practices violate the Google Search guidelines and are considered black hat practices. Good reputable websites should stay away from these practices.
Why is Spamdexing Bad?
Doing unethical practices which manipulate Google (and users) is bad because it will not do good to anyone.
These tactics increase the website’s authority artificially by doing tactics that violate the search essentials Guidelines.
What is the point of boosting your ranking when your site cannot help the users in achieving their goals?
Search engines try to serve the best content to users. But if websites try to exploit the algorithms, then they can get penalized.
Final Words
Doing malicious practices can never yield results in a long term. Instead, one should try to make their website as helpful as they can, so that users would love to come to your website.
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