Spam, in almost any form, is bad for your health. The vast majority of web users would agree with that statement and nobody would even think of the finely processed luncheon meat-product made by Hormel. Even the word itself is infectious in all the worst ways, being used to describe the dark-side and often deceptive side of everything from email marketing to abusive forum behaviour. In the search engine optimization field, spam is used to describe techniques and tactics thought to be banned by search engines or to be unethical business practices.
While writing copy for our soon to be revised website, the team put together a short list of the most outrageous forms of spam we had seen in the last year and a short explanation of the technique.
Please note, we do not encourage, endorse or suggest the use of any of the techniques listed here. We don’t use them and our clients’ sites continue to rank well at Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. Also, since Google has been the dominant search engine for almost five years, most of the spammy tricks evolved in order to game Google and might not apply to the other engines.
1. Cloaking
Also known as...