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YOU Won't Believe How Easy It Is To Get In the TOP 10 Front Pages of the Search Engines
The Search Engine Spam Police
by Shari Thurow, Guest Writer for Search Engine Watch
A special report from the Search Engine Strategies 2002 Conference,
March 4-5, Boston, MA.
"We hate spam!" Representatives of LookSmart and the ODP offer
guidelines and advice for webmasters to avoid the wrath of editors and get
successfully listed in these crucial web directories.
The major search engines and web directories consider spammers to be
those who take extreme measures to get web pages ranked well.
What types of pages are considered spam?
In a Search Engine Strategies session
entitled "The Search Engine Spam Police," representatives from search
engines Inktomi, Google, FAST Search, and web directories LookSmart and
the Open Directory Project explored the issue of spamming and presented
the audience with some general guidelines to follow.
Bob Keating, Editor-in-Chief of the Open Directory Project (ODP),
defined spam as the aggressive and continuous submission of identical
sites to the same or multiple, inappropriate categories, and sites that
violate submission policies for inclusion.
Types of sites that ODP considers spam are:
(1) Affiliate sites with same or similar content but a different site
designs.
(2) Mirror sites. Submitting mirror URLs to different categories is
also considered spam. Multi-lingual sites are acceptable as long as the
URL resolves to the appropriate language.
(3) Sites that use redirects or any type of bait-and-switch practice.
Using frames to hide a real URL, commonly referred to as "poor man's
cloaking," is also considered spam.
(4) Sites whose sole purpose is to drive traffic to affiliate links or
sites that contain these types of links.
If an editor or a submitter is caught spamming, the editor is
immediately removed from ODP without notice, and future submissions are
either deleted or blocked. If the spam is particularly relentless, ODP
might remove "listable" listings as well. If you suspect that an editor or
submitter is spamming, report the spam abuse to staff@dmoz.org.
Kate Wingerson, Vice President and Editor-in-Chief at LookSmart,
considers spam to be any site which explicitly disregards or violates
LookSmart or Zeal (LookSmart's volunteer-built directory) guidelines (see
links below).
In general, LookSmart considers spam to be domains/URLs submitted more
than 5 times, mirror sites, sites that use redirects or bait-and-switch
tactics, and sites without original content. If a site is a commercial web
site, selling goods or businesses online, LookSmart is the place to
submit. Report possible spam abuse to LookSmart to
expsvc@looksmart.net.
If a site is a non-commercial site, Zeal is the place to submit. Zeal
considers spam to be:
(1) Any commercial site submission
(2) Attempts to circumvent the
community submission process
(3) Harassment of members via message
boards or email
(4) Abuse of spelling and capitalization, overuse of
keywords, and biased descriptions
Getting your site listed in the major Web directories is crucial.
Representatives from the Big Three share tips and techniques that help you
facilitate the process.
Tim Mayer, former Director of Web Search Product Management at Inktomi,
stated that "Inktomi considers spam to be pages created deliberately to
trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant, or
poor-quality search results." Spam is more about how and to what extent a
technique is used, Mayer explained, rather than if a technique is
used.
Some of the common practices that Inktomi considers spam are:
(1) Web pages that are built primarily for the search engines and not
your target audience, especially machine-generated pages.
(2) Pages that contain hidden text and hidden links.
(3) "Great quantity and little value" pages.
(4) Link farming and link spamming, particularly free-for-all (FFA)
links.
(5) Cloaking, a practice in which the search engine and the end user do
not view the same page.
(6) Sites with numerous, unnecessary host names (i.e. poker.abc.com,
blackjack.abc.com, etc.).
(7) Excessively cross-linking sites to artificially inflate a site's
apparent popularity.
(8) Affiliate spam.
If a webmaster is caught spamming, Inktomi will either demote the
offending web page/site from its index or completely ban it. If you wish
to dispute a possible spam penalty, or if you wish to report spam, send an
email to spamcrusader@inktomi.com.
Jen McGrath, Software Engineer at Google, advised webmasters to create
sites with appropriate, relevant content and a straightforward design. In
other words, make a useful site that clearly benefits your end users.
McGrath also advised webmasters to submit your site to web directories
and let other sites link to you. Your site does benefit from the sites
that link to it. However, your site can be penalized for the sites that
you link to. Spam penalties include demotion and removal from Google's
index.
Some items that Google considers spam are:
(1) Cloaking.
(2) Automated queries to Google to check positioning. The goal of this
is primarily to tweak a site for positioning purposes, not to create
content that benefits end users.
(3) Hidden text or hidden links.
(4) Stuffing pages with irrelevant keywords.
(5) Doorway pages, domains, and subdomains with the same or similar
content.
(6) "Sneaky" redirects.
Report possible spam abuse via email to spamreport@google.com.
Rolf Michelsen, Software Engineering Manager at FAST Search, defined
spam as using techniques to artificially influence a search engine's
precision or relevancy. Just as Mayer stated earlier, spam is based on
effect rather than technique.
Michelsen presented the following guidelines:
Do:
(1) Focus on content.
(2) Create a site that is easy to use in
simple browsers.
(3) Link to other relevant sites.
(4) Submit the
URL of your main site.
Don't:
(1) Cloak.
(2) Stuff irrelevant keywords into web pages using
invisible text.
(3) Submit all URLs, every day, using the free
submit.
(4) Participate in link farming or FFA links.
(5) Resort to
"snake oil" search engine marketers. In other words, don't fight spam with
spam.
Report possible spam abuse via email to spam@fastsearch.com.
In Zeal, report all possible spam abuse to the community message board,
post a message to the site submitter, or file an intervention request to
receive immediate staff attention.
Submitting to the Open Directory Project
http://dmoz.org/add.html
Submitting to LookSmart
http://looklistings.looksmart.com/
Additional Guideslines for Submitting to LookSmart and
Zeal
http://listings.looksmart.com/help/guidelines.jhtml
http://www.zeal.com/guidelines/user/
Inktomi's Content and Spam Policies
http://www.inktomi.com/products/web_search/guidelines.html
Google's Submission and Spam Policies
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
Shari Thurow is the Marketing Director and Webmaster for
Grantastic Designs, Inc. <http://www.grantasticdesigns.com/>
She has been design and promoting web sites since 1995 for businesses in a
wide range of fields.
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