101 Articles Image Optimization Spam
IMAGE OPTIMIZATION SPAM
Image optimization is an ethical search engine optimization technique adopted by every website owner. The concept is quite simple. Every website serves a purpose by either providing information or selling products along with information. The same product is advertised wide across the internet for deriving traffic to a particular website that sells these products. A common example for that would be Google Images. Every image you could find in every website is listed out in Google images as well. The search feature in Google allows you to search for pictures of products, wallpapers, designs and what not. The moment you like a picture listed among the pages of Google Images and you click upon it, you will be taken to the website that has the particular picture. In terms of products such as LED television sets, you are most likely to end up at a website selling all kinds of television sets. You can gather information about the product and purchase it if you like.
Optimizing an image is a huge task. It involves several parameters and criteria's one has to follow to get a better ranking for their websites. As an expert I can emphasize upon those parameters. Basically, images, flash files, and videos take longer time to load than textual content. So as long as the image is smaller and at the same time visible quite predominantly, it is fine. Most experts tend to prefer images of the JPEG format as it loads quicker than other formats. The size of the image matters most under this context, see to that the image doesn't get blurred while displaying it. The title and the ALT tag titles are very important for an image. It gives the general description about that particular image. The ALT tag is used for providing alternative title which will be displayed when the image is taking more time to load so that the viewer can know something about that particular product in the absence of the particular image. The contents of the website along with the image are very important. Here is where keywords come into play. At all cost, the contents of the webpage should be in relevance with the image. The name of the image also plays a crucial role when it comes to search engine optimization using images. As long as it is appropriate and precise, your image is most likely to be listed among the top results pertaining to that search phrase. Hotlinking is another concept which shouldn't be used as it will devoid the image from being user friendly. Hotlinking doesn't allow the images to be copied or saved and thus web users cannot download that particular image which might be useful for them.
The above mentioned techniques are ethical ways for image optimization and thus it is adopted and practiced by almost every genuine website owner, SEO firms and other web developing companies. The concept is simple. A website shouldn't have too many pictures as it can be viewed as a spam. Appropriate amount of pictures relative to the website providing good information, using sufficient amount of keywords to make the search faster and not over doing it is more than enough for deriving sufficient amount of traffic and improving a website's rank. In turn, your business will also flourish and your website will turn out to be a wonderful marketing tool for your organization.
The Impact of Spammers and Hackers: How they indulge in Image Optimization Spam
Google and other popular search engines accept image optimization techniques to certain levels and everything went smoothly and accordingly until the spammers and hackers came into the picture.
When Image optimization is done properly, image search can direct good and regular traffic to your website which helps to develop both your website as well as your business. Spammers and hackers exploit this condition pretty well.
The ALT tag plays a very crucial role in image optimization. Often overlooked, this can be a lost opportunity for improving your website rankings. ALT attribute provides a descriptive text for the image. It is advisable to have human readable captions and descriptive text around the image. Both of them should be precise and perfect. When the images are not being loaded due to some server problem or takes longer time to load, search engines also have the same problem as blind users, they cannot see the images. Here is where human readable captions and descriptive texts come to the rescue providing details or information about the image. Spammers make use of this opportunity and stuff the ALT tag and other captions with keywords for increasing their keyword density. Keyword density plays a crucial role when it comes to ranking a website and invariably manipulates search engine algorithms.
Image spam is kind of an e-mail spam where the message text of the spam is portrayed as a picture in the image file. This allows them to stuff keywords within the image itself increasing their keyword density.
These spammers also have the necessary technical background. They make use of their coding skills to hide texts behind images that is stuffed with keywords. Here is where the concept of layers arises. At the top most layers, you have the image readable only to viewers. Underneath the picture, these spammers create another layer stuffed with keywords that is visible to crawlers and spiders only. They do not see the image, but rather sees the image as textual content stuffed with keywords pertaining to that site. And thus search engine algorithms get manipulated towards ranking the website higher.
Also as an expert, I can state that at most times you will find spammers website to be of no real use. They do not provide any useful information and sometimes they just have websites without any information. Those websites are filled with images only and nothing else and they use unethical image optimization strategies like the ones mentioned above, to get a better rating for their website and derive more traffic in turn.
Conveniently for them, I found that their strategies for manipulating search engines have worked to a greater extent. Recently, I realized that 6 out of the top result set pertaining to a particular keyword or search phrase belongs to spammers. Also when I click on Google images that are really attractive enough for me to get more details, half the time I end at useless websites that makes no sense or provides no valid information. Most times I am directed to a spammer website that is filled with only images and not any stuff.
As a result, genuine websites are badly affected. These spammers develop their business via their websites at the cost of millions of genuine website owners, SEO firms and other web developing firms and give them a huge headache. They simply do not allow or give the opportunity for other genuine websites to be ranked higher and better and be listed among the top in result sets pertaining to a keyword or a search phrase. Also they amalgamate the result sets and render the search engines to be inefficient in providing proper results annoying millions of web users.
Gone are those days where keyword density is given importance. Today popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo etc are working towards refined algorithms that have rational behavior and could identify and differentiate useful content from spam content. Keyword density is not given much preference for rating a website unless the information provided is useful and relevant to the services provided or described by that particular website. In fact, if a website is found to be stuffing their contents with keywords, or hidden keywords in layers of images, or using keywords in title and ALT tags for providing descriptive texts about a particular image, the website is eventually banned without any explanation. It is advisable for you to be very watchful while performing these search engine optimization strategies and not over do any feature to gain more traffic and a higher ranking for your website. You cannot get a higher ranking for your website these days by over doing any optimization strategy.
Never stuff your websites with images and images alone. Using too many images within a website is also considered to be spam and your site will be banned for it. Already Google and other search engines have been ruthless in their approach when it comes to banning websites for the same reasons. So be very watchful while you develop your website.
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The above image shows that a spammer steals an image from a site in order to gain higher search engine rankings. The spammer then adds rich keywords in the alt attribute of the image to gain high PageRank.
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The screenshot is an extract from the site Wikipedia which shows the percentage of average size of spam in comparison with image spam in the web.
The below graph shows the usage of keywords in various page elements for search engine rankings. It is observed that in both the search engines, i.e. Bing and Google; keyword stuffing is the highest in the "alt" attribute of image tag. Thus resulting in image optimization spam.
The below trend line shows the percentage of image spam in comparison with General spam, over the years 2011 and 2012.
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