What Is Acceptable Search Engine Spamming
What Is Search Engine Spamming?
Search engine spamming is using any deceitful technique or method of altering a site or any component of that site in order to gain a better ranking than it would have otherwise received. As well as altering the content of your website, this can include off site factors, for example purchasing large numbers of inbound links to your website.
Helping To Recognize The Topic Of Your Site
The fact is that the search engines want to promote a better web with genuinely informative and accurate websites. In order to judge this they use mathematical algorithms that consider the relevance of your site to a particular search term, and how many genuine links your site has pointing to it. Doing anything that would be considered unnatural in order to improve your ranking is often considered search engine spamming. However, there are a number of gray areas that are certainly open for debate.
Keyword Cramming Is Bad Spamming
Once upon a time, cramming keywords into a website was considered the norm and it would almost certainly gain you a high ranking with the search engines. However, the major search engines realized that promoting sites that did this by giving them a top ranking was not conducive to providing web surfers with a valuable experience. Instead of seeing genuine websites with genuine information they typically saw websites that contained no real content except a long and repeated list of keywords relevant to the adverts that the page carried.
The Altering Of The Algorithms
As such, the search engines altered their algorithms in order to prevent this from occurring. But the search engines still needed to check page relevancy so an ideal keyword density was used. Different search engines wanted to see different levels of keyword density and this is still true, perhaps even more so, today.
Artificial Keyword Placement
Some would consider the artificial placement of any keywords in a web page as being search engine spamming and, literally speaking, they may be correct. Even doing the keyword research in the first place and finding out the most popular keywords could similarly be considered spamming the search engine databases.
Ascertaining Page Relevancy Using Keywords
But, to look at it another way, without placing keywords pertinent to the topic of your site in the text the search engines can not be expected to know the topic of your site. Another way to look at it is that your visitors may find it difficult to follow the thread of your page without some literal guidance. So, generally speaking, including a small number of highly relevant keywords is safe search engine spamming.
Natural Link Profiles
Search engines theoretically also like to see websites that have a natural link profile. They prefer to see that a site has gained links through offering genuinely valuable content to visitors. In reality, though, this is virtually unattainable without some help. With no links a site is unlikely to get any visitors whatsoever. In turn, nobody will link to the site. One effective method of link building that is considered safe is the submission of articles to article directories.
Article Directories And Their Role
Article directories act as a go between for authors and website owners. At the footer of the article it is possible to include one or two links to a website. The articles are picked up and published by other website owners in exchange for the publishing of the links to your site. This is a popular service with both authors and webmasters because the article and the publishing website are naturally based around the same or a very similar topic giving the links more credence than some other methods of link building.
Safe Search Engine Spamming
Safe search engine spamming is acceptable with search engines and webmasters. It still requires that your site offers genuine value without overdoing the instances of keywords found within the site. While your link profile may not be entirely natural it will be extremely close to the real thing. Attempting to fool the search engines with unethical spamming such as cloaking or hiding text, or cramming a ludicrously high number of keywords into the text of your site is not only considered a bad thing but is highly likely to see your website penalized for your efforts.