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Mopping Up The Competition: Report Spam
| Written by David A. Farrell | Published 11-30-06 - Updated 01-02-08 | Page 01 of 02 |
In the world of SEO and web development, spam or spamdexing is the use of black hat (as opposed to white hat, or the relatively recent middle-ground proliferation of grey hat) tactics to artificially inflate a website's showing in organic search results. I use the word "tactics" here instead of "techniques," because techniques connotates a certain degree of artistry or decency of craft, in contrast to the word tactics, which airs a sense of the frustration and disillusionment many web designers and SEO's feel when two or three of the top-ten search results from a query belong to the bad guys, while the good-guys reign in around twenty-ninth. Such tactics include (and are in no way limited to):
Duplicate sites or pages
Deceptive redirects
Cloaked pages
Doorway pages
Hidden page text or links
Misleading, junk, or repeated text
Competitor name or trademark inclusion, etc.
The objective here is to clear away some of those bad guys to make room for the good guys, which ultimately betters the Internet. Some may think, however, that as long as their interests are not in web development or SEO, websites that spamdex are not a problem. This could not be further from the truth. Websites that spamdex prevent people from finding what they need on the Internet. They do this by cloggling up search results with generally useless or irrelevant information in order to draw vistor traffic away from decent sites. For many online business owners, loss of visitor traffic often translates to a decline in sales and/or revenue. For those of you with noncommercial sites, it basically means that your message is not getting out there. But what can you do?
Most SEO's already understand the impact of spam on their work, as do many developers, and have devised a number of strategies for combating it. One such strategy is reporting sites that spamdex through their exclusive webmasters accounts, like this one provided free by Google at Google Webmasters Tools. For the layperson, however –novice designers working hard to develop websites for themselves and friends, following all the rules and tips they read about in onlin articles and forums, and getting destoyed in organic search results despite their best efforts to do well– there appears to be little recourse. For these individuals this article has been written; and for these individuals I shall illuminate your rod and staff.
Leveling Your Playing Field
Though the number of websites using spam tactics varies from search query to search query, what matters most is the spam concentration in your particular field of interest. Your first line of defense against spam sites clogging up search results and preventing users from reaching your well-written, correctly-optimized web pages is to take up the offensive and list as many bad websites as you can operating between you and your target audience and then have them banned. Understanding the use of keywords and phrases with repect to user queries will expedite this process immensely. The object here is to find a narrow, high-traffic niche where your website can take hold, and then clear away the refuse so your interests have room to grow.
This simple but effective strategy is based on the fact that some search engines (like Google, for instance) consider as many as one hundred variables when calculating a website's topic relevance. What's more is that competing search engines set different values for each variable they include. Thus, a website ranked fourth on MSN might rank twenty-fourth on Yahoo, and sixtieth on Google. Furthermore, a site's pagerank assessment does not take place immediately after it's been crawled by a search bot. The process of evalutating a given website for topic relevance and rank for specific sets of search queries can take several weeks, or even months of repeated crawls. This is the cold, hard truth of SEO and search engine results. And so, as a side bar, the next time some SEO company approaches you, boasting their services can have your site bullying the top-ten in two weeks, give them my card and let them know I have some nice vacation property on Mars I'd like to sell them. The point is, if you discover a spam site anywhere near the top-ten, or even in the top-100, right down their URL and waste no time in your attack. For without a doubt, other black hat SEO tactics got them there, and this is exactly the soft white underbelly we've been looking for. Begin your search.
But What If I Only Find One Spammer?
Don't give up! Albeit finding just one spam site is more of a success than most people realize, there are always more spammers lurking in the underbrush, with new recruits filling the ranks of their compatriots as fast as they are being banned. Your primary concern, however, is the top-100. Scan the first one hundred results of at least three relevant keyword or keyword phrases in your field and make a list of all the websites your believe to be spamdexing. If you do this and find only one spammer (which in most fields is highly unlikely), you've done your job. The hardest part of any attack is staying focused.
The basic argument is this: No matter how incredible your website's content or keyword choice might be, it's difficult to make a strong showing in the top-100 and next to impossible to break into the top-ten on content and keywords alone. This is true for all the big-named search engines, unless of course your particular field is ridiculously narrow (which won't provide much exposure for you or your interests anyway) or you've stumbled upon a "pumpkin patch," where the majority of your competitors' websites are just plain borked up and sad. If the latter is the situation you find youself in, then God bless. In all likelihood, however, this is not the case at all; and like the rest of us, you now realize you've got a pretty decent fight on your hands if your looking to rank well on a given search engine. Otherwise, you wouldn't have continued to read my article up to this point.
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