Understanding Web Spam and Adopting Smarter SEO Practices

According to Google, billions of web pages are published every day to rank in the SERPs. Many publishers are unaware of the web spam, many unintentionally perform web spamming activities by applying the wrong SEO strategies.

Read along everything about web spamming and the best-ever SEO techniques to avoid it.

What Is Web Spam?

Web Spam is a technique employed by certain websites to attempt to make it towards the first position on the search engine results page. For instance, they will repeatedly use keywords and pay other sites to provide backlinks to their sites. The web spamming techniques are intended to violate search engines’ rules and make them appear in the first place on the search results. Internet Spam is considered a bad idea as legitimate websites are lost in the results. Web spamming includes the following: Term Spamming, URL Spamming, Link Spamming, Content hiding, Cloaking, Redirection, etc.

Link spam

Link spamming is one of the most significant factors that are responsible for web spamming; here are some key points to remember to avoid link spam: 

• Websites with Guest and sponsored posts with no proper tags 
• Affiliate links that aren’t marked as affiliate links.
• Link exchanges, where websites accept to link to each other to aid in SEO.
• Automated Links
• Include infected links at the end, like placing footers links, or embedded widgets  
• Links that aren’t natural on blogs and forums

Google’s algorithm is improving in detecting link spam, meaning the form is getting less popular because it has lost its efficacy.

Auto-Generated And Scraped Content

Generating automated content using rewriting applications is also web spamming and unethical SEO practice. It’s evident when a site contains such a type of content on it as it makes sense, but it’s not exactly. The content could be pulled straight from different websites or added a few sentences to make it stand out.

The spin articles are published as guest posts on the internet or sold as unique content to unsuspecting customers. These articles often show distinct signs that show they’re generated by an automated system, such as the writing style is not natural and the style is stilted.

Redirects And Doorway Pages

The web page is automatically directed through the browser identically to ensure that the engine indexes the page; however, the user won’t be able to see it. Essentially, it acts as a proxy or doorway to fool the engine and mislead users.

Content Hiding & Keywords Stuffing

These are strategies where links and standard terms remain hidden while the browser crawls a webpage. The most common methods use colour schemes that depict the elements of the page effectively and invisibly. Keyword stuffing is another aspect they’ll look into, as tests have revealed that spam pages place much more keywords in the title component than non-spammy pages.

Bottomline

SEO shortcuts aren’t the best way to get on top of search engine results pages. Techniques like genuine backlinks and relevant content are more sophisticated. Beware of scams and improve your essential tools. To understand how SEO has evolved over the year and how your business can benefit, Reach out to us for smart results-driven SEO practices.