Tactics
that may be considered spam |
- Meta refresh
tags
- Invisible/tiny
text
- Irrelevant
keywords
- Excessive
repetition of keywords
- Overuse
of mirror sites (same sites
that point to different
URLs)
- Submitting
via automatic programs
- Link farms
-
Unsolicited emails
- Doorway pages
-
Cloaking (delivering one
page to the engines and
another to the visitors)
Beware of SEO
outfits guaranteeing you a
top listing in Search Engines.
With today's volume of sites
on the web, no-one can make
this claim, and chances are
they are using unethical methods
that you may be penalized
for.
See our paragraph
on "A
Note on Realistic Expectations"
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What is spam?
It's just as important to know what not
to do when optimizing your site. Ignorance can lead
to your site not getting listed, or worse; getting blacklisted
for spamming.
There are many examples of spam. Some
are excessive keyword stuffing or use of keywords not
relevant to the sites content. Invisible text full of
keywords has also been used to "up" keyword
frequency.
Search engines and directories hate tactics
intended to fool them into giving high rankings to irrelevant
pages. Remember, they strive to provide the most relevant
results to their users, but spam clutters their indices
with irrelevant information. They now know of these
techniques and define it as spam. If you use tactics
like this, in the best case, you will not get your site
listed. Worse case, you will be banned.
Unsolicited mass-distributed commercial
email is also considered spamming. Hotmail, Yahoo email
and AOL strictly enforce banning of mass-distributed,
unsolicited email - all they need to do is follow the
IP address to the server distributing the spamming and
block any further emails from that server. The best
way to avoid banning of email, is to send email by"opt-in",
i.e. the customers voluntarily signs up to receive your
email.
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