Search Engine Spamming

SPAM is the obvious and deliberate reverse-engineering of the Search Engine algorithm, in order to improve the result of a particular page for particular search phrases. --Posting on message board

The purpose of a search engine is to provide searchers with the best possible results for a keyword or phrase. For example, if someone searches for "alamo", the best, most usable web pages should be presented to the searcher first. 

This makes it critical for a search engine spider (the piece of software which scans web pages and adds them to the search engine) to be able to understand what keywords and phrases are appropriate for each and every page it encounters. This is not an easy task for an automated program.

These spiders scour the web for pages, then attempt to figure out how to get the correct search phrase to the correct page. How they do this is nothing short of magic.

Think about it - a web page is a text document which contains human-readable information as well as commands for the browser (and occasionally data for spidering software). When the spidering software first encounters a web page, it theoretically knows nothing about the page, it's subject and the relevance of it's data.

Thus, from a start of no knowledge, the spider has to decide which keywords and phrases pertain to the material found. It also has to decide how important that page is in relation to each keyword and phrase. For example, if someone searches on "yo-yo's" and this page is indeed about yo-yo's, then should it be listed first, tenth or fifty-thousandth on the list of results returned to the searcher? The first match is, in theory, the most likely to contain the desired information, the second is next most likely and so on.

Most webmasters consider being on the first page of results for a keyword or phrase to be extremely desirable. In fact, for some commercial sites the difference between being on the first page of a major engine such as Google and the second can mean tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. In some highly competitive areas, millions of dollars can be at stake.

For years experts in the field of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) have attempted to determine how search engines examine, analyze and rank web pages. These experts spend incredible amounts of time experimenting, examining, observing and reverse engineering the algorithms used by search engines in order to get their (and their clients) pages to rank higher for desirable keywords and phrases.

Some of the techniques they use include:

Domain Name Spamming - A domain name can tell a spider a lot about a site, and creating thousands of them can say even more.

Guestbook Spamming - To fool some search engines into thinking there are a lot of links to a site, some unethical webmasters run special programs which create entries in thousands or even millions of guestbooks.

Keyword stuffing - Spiders look for the number of occurrences of keywords and phrases on a page to determine the subject (or subjects) of the information. Spammers can skew the results by including keywords in various places.

Log File Spamming - It's possible to take advantage of publicly available web site statistics to create the illusion of links to a site.