By : Nidhi Gupta

Most of us think of spam as junk email. Search engine spam is different. Search engine spam is any means of manipulating search engine spiders to artificially boost a website’s page rank or positioning on search engine results pages. In other words, search engine spam is any tactic employed by site owners to fool search engine spiders. Not a good idea.

What is and isn’t spam?
Every search engine has its own definition of what constitutes search engine spam. So, in essence, spam is whatever search engine geeks say it is. However, there’s an obvious, widespread consensus among search engine professionals as to what constitutes spam.

Further, search engine information pages provide clear guidelines for what they consider acceptable and unacceptable practices.

Three of the most common search engine spam tactics are hidden text, doorway pages and mirror sites. Let’s look at each one.

1. Hidden text
   Hidden text, sometimes called search spam, is text that’s invisible to visitors but readable to search engine spiders. Drop a block of white text on a white background and it’s completely invisible to human eyeballs but easily readable by spiders.

   Hidden text is usually just a slew of keywords, variations on keywords and other information of interest to search engine spiders but not very helpful to humans. So, when you visit the site, you see nothing but white space. Spiders scan line after line of keywords which may well artificially boost the site’s page rank.

   Another use employed by many SEO rookies is to hide text in the HTML code that supports the site skin. This is another wrong-headed ploy that will get your new site slammed faster than you can say ‘Welcome’.

2. Doorway pages
   Doorway pages and/or splash screens are nothing more than full-sized advertisements. Search engines have been able to detect these pages for almost 10 years but site owners and unknowing webmasters still employ this subterfuge.

   A doorway page or splash screen is a stand-alone page in front of the main site. It’s purpose? To land high in search engine results pages and get you to click on the doorway page link. So, let’s say you’re shopping for surf boards on line. So you Google surfboards, scroll down a few links and see what appears to be the perfect site for what you’re looking for. You click the link and you’re taken to a garbage page with lots of adverts, usually some hidden text and the simple direction, ‘For surfboards, click here’. You, web surfer, have been hoodwinked.

   Doorway pages have one purpose - to drive traffic to a site. They don’t provide information, product listings or contact information. They’re like full-screen banner ads that you have to pass through to get to the actual site you’re looking for. Search engines hate doorway pages because they diminish the quality of their results and annoy their users.

   So, how do you distinguish between a doorway page and a very active homepage? Simple. The homepage appears on the site map and can be accessed from other pages within the site. Not so with a doorway page. It’s strictly one-way - in! You can’t access a doorway page from the interior of the site. You can only access it by clicking on the search engine results link again.

Here’s what Google has to say about doorway pages right on the Google Quality Guidelines page: ‘Avoid doorway pages created just for search engines’. Simple advice. Good advice.

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