As long as there is search, there will always be spam. The practice of spamming the search engines - creating pages and schemes designed to artificially inflate rankings or abuse the ranking algorithms employed to sort content - has been rising since the mid-1990's.
With payouts so high (at one point, a fellow SEO noted to us that a single day ranking atop Google's search results for the query "buy viagra" could bring upwards of $20,000 in affiliate revenue), it's little wonder that manipulating the engines is such a popular activity on the web. However, it's become increasingly difficult and, in our opinion, less and less worthwhile for two reasons.
1. Not Worth the Effort
Users hate spam, and the search engines have a financial incentive to fight it. Many believe that Google's greatest product advantage over the last 10 years has been their ability to control and remove spam better than their competitors. It's undoubtedly something all the engines spend a great deal of time, effort and resources on. While spam still works on occasion, it generally takes more effort to succeed than producing "good" content, and the long term payoff is virtually non-existent.
Instead of putting all that time and effort into something that the engines will throw away, why not invest in a value added, long term strategy instead?
2. Smarter Engines
Search engines have done a remarkable job identifying scalable, intelligent methodologies for fighting spam manipulation, making it dramatically more difficult to adversely impact their intended algorithms. Complex concepts likeTrustRank (which Moz's Linkscape index leverages), HITS, statistical analysis, historical data and more have all driven down the value of search spam and made so-called "white hat" tactics (those that don't violate the search engines' guidelines) far more attractive.
More recently, Google's Panda update introduced sophisticated machine learning algorithms to combat spam and low value pages at a scale never before witnessed online. If the search engines' job is to deliver quality results, they have raised the bar year after year.
This guide is not intended to show off specific spam tactics, but, due to the large number of sites that get penalized, banned or flagged and seek help, we will cover the various factors the engines use to identify spam so as to help SEO practitioners avoid problems. For additional details about spam from the engines, see Google's Webmaster Guidelines and Bing's Webmaster FAQs (pdf).
The important thing to remember is this: Not only do manipulative techniques not help you in most cases, but often times they cause search engines to impose penalties on your site.
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