301 redirect is a browser based permanent redirect which tells the user that a page or website has permanently moved to a new location and the current location will either disappear or will be removed in a course of time. 301 redirect is the most effective way to tell the search engine that a page or website has moved... Read More

Pay per click Advertisements on a webpage have become the latest trend of marketing adopted by many marketing companies. It in general generates a lot of revenue for the website owner every time a viewer clicks on those particular ads listed on a webpage. The advertisements that appear on a webpage are related to the contents and the contextual aspects of that particular webpage...Read More

Affiliate websites are the biggest menace the search engines have to face. Both users and search engines like relevant quality and unique content. Search engine users want to click the link and end up on websites that offer quality information and quality products / services at good price. An affiliate is just redirecting the users to buy a product where he earns a commission for all the sales he does for the linked website. Read More

It's natural for a webmaster for asking to return a favor if they are asked for links from their website. But today everyone use aggressive link exchange methods. Some people go the extent of using an email harvester to crawl websites, get the email IDs from them and store in a database. Later they will use the email IDs and send out spam link exchange emails to their sites...Read More

Auto blogging has become very popular amongst millions of web surfers and blog owners. It can be a great source of income for many blog owners. However, great caution has to be practiced while engaging in automatic blog posting systems as a single mistake could be quite devastating and end up banning your site. . .Read More

Yahoo Answers and other famous portals where people meet often provide the huge feed for this software. Everything your forum needs is already in here neatly categorized. They have thousands of new and diverse questions being asked and the same answered by the immense user base which fundamentally serves as your topics and answers... Read More

Machine generated pages have been into existence since the search engines came into existence. Machine generated pages are primarily created to deceive the search engines from thinking that the pages have valid quality information...Read More

I am surprised how far people can go when they want to spam Google and get backlinks to their website. In links industry, automated links were restricted to link exchanges, FFA, Directories; Article sites etc but nowadays even one way links are automated. A typical example is TNX.net which uses a standard inclusion code onto your website and later they retrieve ads text links from their servers and display them on advertiser's website.. Read More

Over the last couple of years or so, social networking has become a revelation amidst millions of web users. It brings in people closer from different nations, share their views, chat with friends, share photos and notes, post videos, update status, scribble on walls and scrapbooks, comment or post your views, video conferencing, advertise events, wish people and send them gifts on their birthdays etc. . .Read More

In expired domain spam, we buy domains that expired with good PageRank and link popularity. But there are companies who approach small Businesses or small mom and pop sites, personal blogs and offer a price to buy that domain. Unlike expired domains this method is more popular and more valuable.... Read More

There are so many different opinions on buying text links. In my opinion buying links stands on top on the table of 100 Search Engine Manipulations. Buying links on other sites has been in existence from the day internet started. It is just another sort of advertisement. But from the day search engines started depending upon Backlinks to rank a website; text link becomes the biggest danger...Read More

Click Fraud is defined as the act of generating illegal revenue from the advertisements placed on a website. Click fraud can also be targeted on competitor sites to make them spend huge on potential spam clicks on their ads. It is inter-related with Google Adsense system. After Google came up with the system most websites and search engine result webpages are filled with numerous ads... Read More

Cloaking is an old tactic to cheat the search engines by showing a keyword rich content to the search engines but showing the users a different content. There are 2 types of significant cloaking tactics both for search engine benefit...Read More

Cold calling and Email spamming has become an aggressive method today. Lots of small scam companies and even some regular SEO companies are resorting to these sorts of tactics. They just go to a website using a Google search or by some other means take the email ID or phone number listed on their website, send them an email asking them sign up for their unethical Search engine optimization service. . .Read More

The whole point of comments in blogs, news sites and products sites is to get users interactive with the websites they are commenting on. Comments help build up communities. If you comment on someone's website they know you better, they know you are visiting their website and taking time to comment about something they sell or write... Read More

It is quite obvious in the webmaster world that spammy links or too many backlinks from a site can badly affect the rankings of a website, and can bring down the site's rankings to a very low level. In a competitive world like today, people take every possible step to be ahead of all in their respective fields, either by becoming better through enhancement or by letting the competitors down in every possible way...Read More

Duplicate content refers to contents within a website or across different websites that are substantially similar to the original copy of the content. There are number of reasons why a copy is similar. Some of them are really valid reasons but some are intended to SPAM the search engines. Duplicate contents occur in various ways... Read More

Before the launch of Google Panda update in the year 2011, many sites that were ranking high were populated with large number of articles that covered various areas of interest ranging from news, blogs and entertainment. These sites contained low quality information are today known as content farms...Read More

Spamming the search engines using craigslist, a popular classifieds website, has been into existence from the time craigslist became popular. Craigslist is used by millions of sellers, buyers, service providers as a medium to sell / buy products, which are no longer of any use or if the person want to get rid of something.Recently we came across a potential client, who wanted to do SEO for his website. . .Read More

CSS is an abbreviation for Cascading Style Sheets. It is a language used for describing the presentation semantics of a document written in markup language. Basically it is used for handling the looks and formatting aspects of a webpage or as a markup language document. CSS language is closely tied with HTML and XHTML and you can find applications of CSS commonly in these documents...Read More

Google and other top search engines launched a tag; we call it the nofollow tag to fight comment spamming. Comment spam was a major problem for search engines and to fight this they introduced the Nofollow tag which will tell the search engines not to follow that particular link or give any PageRank benefit for them...Read More

Domain farming is similar to link farming where you register 100s of domains for the primary purpose of manipulating search engine results and search engine rankings. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to register 100s of domains to sell their product. Having one website and promoting them, is the best way to sell 1000s of products...Read More

Doorway pages are pages created just for search engines, where a page is created with keyword stuffing or just junk contents about a keyword phrase or a particular topic and made to rank and later the traffic redirected to main pages. Doorway pages were a strategic part of many search engine optimization companies...Read More

Duplicate content has been in talks for a very long time. Google has openly admitted that duplicate content on your site will not get you penalized but it doesn't help much in ranking. Just because of this, people use duplicate content extensively on their sites. Duplicate content occurs in various forms but here the problem is with duplicate content across multiple domains...Read More

Education sites and government sites are a primary target of search engine manipulators. Primary reason behind this is, in SEO point of view, .edu and .gov sites are predominantly ranked higher by popular search engines for their quality backlinks and proper distribution/density of keywords...Read More

Buying expired domains for the sake of getting ranking boost, has been there since the search engines started becoming popular. Importance of search engine traffic and ranking has pushed the search engine manipulator to great extends. Due to the heavy reliability of links to rank a web site, people are finding all possible ways to get quick high PageRank...Read More

Rumors do spread like a virus and victimize millions when proper evidences for the story have been provided. Creating a buzz has become quite a sensation amidst millions of web users as well. And every year people do keep falling for these rumors created by websites in the form of contents eventually...Read More

Computer Surveillance is an act that every company ought to undertake in order to protect their data. Today our world is entirely connected with the help of network and we heavily depend upon it for our survival. The net has its own pros and cons where spamming and hacking has been one of the biggest concerns dealt by several organizations...Read More

Any business requires several good marketing strategies to reach out for more people and develop one's business as well as profits. It is the same irrespective of what kind of a business anyone embarks upon. Every business is eventually meant to provide services or manufacture products for the common man and the communities and in turn develop their own business and profits to earn a living for themselves involved in that particular business...Read More

Forum signature spam works very similar to a forum spam. A SEO company or an individual can try to abuse forums for link power in many ways. Google relies on PageRank to rank websites. There are some popular forums that pass good PageRank for websites if the links of the spammer is added to footer... Read More

If you ever run a forum you will definitely come across spamming. You start a forum then you setup different category and sub category then wait for posts to come in. Say if you are running PHPBB forum and if you have guest posting enabled you will note that the frequent guest posts will not come from your friends or quality visitors but from the spammers...Read More

FFA is the abbreviation for Free for All links which are basically webpages that allows anyone to submit his/her website's URL in their website for absolutely free of cost. The site acts as a home to thousands and thousands of FFA pages... Read More

"Google groups" is a message board from Google that enables users to interact between themselves. Topics discussed range from information related to Google to generic topics. "Google groups" are one of the leading message boards these days. "Google groups" is the only place where you can see Google employees directly interacting with people, who have questions regarding Google products and services...Read More

Google Bomb is an issue faced by many well reputed and organized websites. The whole concept started a decade ago where a search for "more evil than Satan himself" text led to the Microsoft homepage. It is an action where certain specific sites are found using certain specific texts that is totally irrelevant to the contents of that particular website...Read More

Layers are a great way to hide your contents or links from users. Search engine spammers can hide keywords under the graphics and the users cannot see the keywords but the search engines can. Layers can be as DHTML or divs. Hidden layers are very similar to hidden DIVs. In some cases, they are literally same and used virtually the same way... Read More

Hidden text came into existence much before Google came into the search engine world. When search engines started gaining popularity in mid 1990s, lots of aggressive SEOs started using methods for tricking the search engines and gaining traffic. There are many types of hidden text. The most common method used is the same color background and same color font... Read More

Originally search engine algorithms were designed based on backlinks, keywords, traffic derivation etc for assessing websites. However over time website owners, SEO experts and other web developing companies realized the flaw and found a loop hole and started stuffing their websites with keywords and deriving fake backlinks...Read More

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... Read More

A good internal link structure is important for search engine ranking. But there are some unethical websites that do excessive spamming of their internal links. Loading 100s of links on a page and cross linking them across other pages to transfer internal PageRank has been a strategy used by many Search engine spammers...Read More

In HTML, the span and div elements are used where the document cannot be semantically described by other HTML elements. For example, the paragraph tag (P), header tag (h1) all describes a function according to the type of data it contains. But in span and div there is no logical grouping. There are ways you can hide contents inside div and spam the search engines... Read More

It's natural for a webmaster for asking to return a favor if they are asked for links from their website. But today everyone use aggressive link exchange methods. Some people go the extent of using an email harvester to crawl websites, get the email IDs from them and store in a database. Later they will use the email IDs and send out spam link exchange emails to their sites...Read More

Revolution of internet has brought massive increase in online job opportunities. Internet is the No.1 place for searching good job these days. Traditionally people used to find jobs from yellow pages, newspapers and other media. Now due to the popularity of internet more and more people come online to search for jobs...Read More

We see 100s of article sites today. Why do they exist? I have seen use for very few article sites like ezine articles, article dash board etc. But what about others, we see more than 500 article sites. All these article sites want to show that they have lot of content pages to search engines. But in fact almost all the content pages they have are duplicated across other article sites... Read More

Blogs were the find of the 21stcentury it gave the opportunity for copy writers to write their personal experience or professional experience without the standard writing rules. Because of this blogs became very people with search engines. Every search engine out there liked blogs because of their unique and interesting information...Read More

Similar to unrelated keywords spamming, the search engines with keyword misspellings proved to be effective and highly manipulative. There are some SEO companies who recommend people to stuff pages with misspellings because it helps with search engines. People are bound to make spelling errors when they do a search. When search engines find a web page where the searched misspelling is found they will return that result... Read More

"Spamming for the idiot search engine" That is what I call this method. You research a bunch of keywords that you want a start a website with. Then you input the keywords into this keyword page generator and boom, you end up with 100 pages of contents with the keywords included in the content of those pages. Sounds ridiculous right? It's true! There are a number of spammers who use this method to gain higher search engine results...Read More

Keyword stuffing is the method of stuffing 100s and 1000s of junk and obscured words on a web page to inflate search engine rankings. People had been stuffing keywords on their pages for many years to impress the search engines. There are various methods of keyword stuffing. Contents in Meta tags,on page contents, Noscript tags, noembed tags, no frames tag etc...Read More

Domain names are the hostnames for identifying and locating internet resources such as websites.Individual systems such as host systems make use of domain names as hostnames. Hostnames are leaf labels in the DNS without further subordinates and they appear as a component of Uniform Resource Locators (URL's) for websites... Read More

Link dump sites are sites that allow you to drop your links without any restriction or moderation. There are various methods of link dumping some common methods are blog comment spam, guestbook spamming, submitting to 1000s of directories, submitting to 1000s of article sites, forums etc...Read More

There are various definitions of link farm. Basically links farms are a hub of interconnected websites / web pages which are used to increase the PageRank of the interconnected web pages and increase the link popularity of all the links connected with each other. Almost all the methods of link farming are meant to manipulate the search engine results.Some methods of link farm SPAM...Read More

It is quite understandable that the whole world revolves around the internet for survival. Internet has made life much easier than what it was and it has brought people across continents together. It has enabled companies to expand and develop a platform for a comprehensive marketing strategy via developing websites and make more business for themselves...Read More

Counter links are very similar to widget spam links. Counters are another type of widget that is added to different web pages of a website to track the visitors to a website. Most popular free counter or tracking software provider is stat counter. Most people use stat counter these days. Stat counter does have a link back their website from almost the tracking code they provide to their users. Here is an example of stat counter tracking code...Read More

Machine generated pages can be similar to the keyword page creator where you input a set of keywords and you end up with 1000s of automatically created SPAM pages. Then these pages are used to redirect users from the page to their affiliate links or to junk stuffed ads...Read More

As the popularity of search engines grew many spammers tried every possible tactic to rank a website. They were even ready to go to the lowest of low levels to get traffic from search engines. Search engines drive almost 80% of all 1st time traffic to a website. It's very important to make search engines happy and get high rankings in search engine results...Read More

The whole concept of MFA sites originated after the introduction of Adwords and Adsense. The Google Adwords system was introduced in the millennium wherein advertisers were allowed to advertise on the search engine's results page. Of course the ads fell in context to the search list depending upon what the viewer seeks for...Read More

Micro blog or micro blogging is the next generation of blogging where the users type / send texts or updates similar to the offline SMS system. Excellent example of micro blogging is twitter which has risen to its peak in the last 2 years. Micro blogs have lot of good benefits. It reduces the time for conveying your message with large posts...Read More

Link dump sites are sites that allow you to drop your links without any restriction or moderation. There are various methods of link dumping some common methods are blog comment spam, guestbook spamming, submitting to 1000s of directories, submitting to 1000s of article sites, forums etc...Read More

Mirror websites are a major problem with search engines. Even today mirror websites are prevalent in many industries. Mirror websites mostly exists in quote engines, web builders, template based blogs, lead generation websites etc...Read More

Abusing NOSCRIPT tags is another way to place hidden content within a page so that the search engines will index it, but the visitor won't see the content. NOSCRIPT tags are also a valid optimization method for displaying an alternative representation of JavaScript content. The NOSCRIPT tag is not unethical by itself, only if misused...Read More

One way links is the practice of having backlinks from website / webpage without linking back to the originating site. For long time search engines and users consider this as a valid method to rank a website. There are good, bad and ugly one way links, which is the problem search engines have to face. Worst search engine manipulation happens in one way links...Read More

Link dump sites are sites that allow you to drop your links without any restriction or moderation. There are various methods of link dumping some common methods are blog comment spam, guestbook spamming, submitting to 1000s of directories, submitting to 1000s of article sites, forums etc...Read More

Page Hijacking is a form of search engine index spamming. It is done by creating a rogue copy of a popular website which shows contents that is similar to the original web crawler; but it redirects the web surfers to unrelated or malicious websites...Read More

PageRank sculpting is a search engine optimization strategy that has been recommended by numerous SEOs before Google realized the spam and neutralized this method. In 2005, Google recommended the usage of NOFOLLOW tag to avoid spam links from being crawled and other search engines and HTML standard readily accepted it...Read More

Paid reviews are part of the web. It has been into existence ever since the internet started. People are paid to review websites, products, articles, blog contents, Businesses etc. Most of the time people are paid to write positive reviews and there is nothing wrong about this...Read More

Every website being created needs to have a domain name. Domain name is an identification label that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority and control in the internet. It is the basic essence of websites and without a domain a website simply cannot function or even exists for that matter. Domain names are hostnames to identify internet protocol (IP) resources such as websites...Read More

Similar to paid review pay per blog review or pay per post helps a website rank better by embedding a link inside the paid blog post. Blog are very popular tools these days and play a vital role in boosting a sites ranking. Blogs link out freely similar to Wikipedia and people like blogs for this important reason...Read More

Phishing is an act closely tied up with computer security. It is a criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information from millions of web users who are quite vulnerable by nature such as usernames, passwords, credit card details, bank account details, e-mail id's etc. It is able to do the same by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in electronic communication...Read More

Profiles are meant to help people identify themselves on a forum or social networking site or other areas where their friends can easily find them. Most of these sites that help list your profile also favor adding a link or multiple links in a profile. Even some social networking sites helps you create profile with link and make them available public...Read More

Most of the search engines like fresh contents, contents that are updated regularly or over a period of time in regular intervals. Especially search engine optimization experts know search engines like fresh refreshed contents to maintain high rankings in search engines. It is important to periodically update the information to keep the site. Search engines like fresh information...Read More

If you are a regular internet user you would have come across such kind of schemes in the internet. Most of these one page websites claim to give you ideas on how to make millions by purchasing a produce for just 49$. From our experience, most of these fraud SEO schemes are just useless. They just teach you how to cheat the search engines...Read More

Scraper sites were a menace to the search engines before couple of years. 100% of scraper sites don't have any original contents. All they do is they have search engine crawlers like what Google has. They search Google for a particular keyword phrase and index all the URLs that come up in top 1000 for that particular keyword phrase...Read More

This is an interesting topic as the name suggests. Search engines have evolved from Meta search engines to giants like Google. The 1st search engines did not even have the ability to crawl and index a page. They only index pages / sites that were submitted to them. Then came the Meta search engines which were capable of crawling and indexing only Meta tags...Read More

Search engine submission generally refers to how a webmaster submits his/her website directly to a search engine. There are many search engines available in the internet in the last decade. Earlier about a decade ago search engine submissions were pretty much necessary in order to improve the visibility of a website online...Read More

SEO contests were originated in the year 2004. Some SEOs started to play with search engines by trying to rank phrase on top of Google results. The site that ranks on top of Google SERPs will get the 1st prize. Prizes were announced based on the participation and competition of the tournament...Read More

Sending spam mails has become very common today and millions of web surfers are either getting affected by falling for it or getting annoyed as their mail folders are flooded with spam mails...Read More

Shadow domains are essentially website specifically created for search engine spiders rather than humans. It is a deliberate attempt practiced to improve a particular website's rankings and make it list among the top 10 results sets produced by search engines pertaining to a search phrase...Read More

Google base is the latest revelation which has enabled viewers to search for products with much ease and at the quickest rate possible. It has created a revolution in terms of making shopping much easier for people...Read More

Sneaky redirects are used to deceive the search engines and users that show different version of pages to both of them. It usually works in conjunction with cloaking or doorway pages...Read More

Social bookmarking is a way to store and share data with the power of internet to reach anyone around the world. Social bookmarking evolved from traditional bookmarking techniques, where a user will add a website or webpage that he likes to his favorites so that he can access it later for research, reading or other purposes...Read More

Due to immense rise in popularity of social networking websites search engine spammers are targeting unsuspected social networking users with different types of attacks. Attacks include spamming them with money schemes, junk services / products and even luring them to click on links that might lead to phishing or downloading malware...Read More

Spam blogs came into existence in the late 2003 and beginning of 2004. It was a strategy picked by aggressive Search Engine marketers to promote their sites or client sites. Lots of blogs were registered in sites like blogspot.com, blogdrive.com, blog-city.com, livejournal.com and some junk contents was posted to increase the backlinks which would in turn help the ranking of a website...Read More

Before writing this article we interviewed around 500 people, all active internet users and asked whether they use any online directories to find information. I am talking about general directories not topic specific directories. Almost all of them said they haven't used directory in their whole internet life...Read More

Link spam otherwise known as spamming by creating backlinks is used for the development of a particular website and earn more business. It is an unethical way of search engine optimization which achieves what is necessary by misleading the connectivity based ranking algorithms in search engines. The procedure is commonly followed by spammers and hackers for their own website...Read More

Tagging systems allow users to interact proactively or annotate a pool of resources with descriptive strings which are called tags. In Del.icio.us, users annotate web pages that are interesting and they even write small descriptive terms for it. Basically tags are used to guide users to areas where they are interested...Read More

Spam widget as described by a senior search engine employee, is the method of getting links from a widget to sites that are completely unrelated to the site and also getting links from widgets to other sites by sponsoring the widgets. Search engine spammers have been using this tactic effectively. They approach a widget provider and pay them money to link to their own sites...Read More

There are many ways to build backlinks to your site and if you have the money power, backlinks becomes easier and faster. One of the easy but effective ways to build backlinks is through sponsorship opportunities. By sponsoring an event or a project or a charity website, you can build relationship that can help you to request backlinks from their website...Read More

Sub domains are virtually considered different websites, which are easy and cheap to setup. Just by doing a simple configuration on your server you can make the server understand names like domain1.yourdomain.com, domain2.yourdomain.com. Most of the big sites have sub domains and there is nothing wrong in it. There are many valid reasons to have sub-domains...Read More

Sybil Attack as the name suggests means forging of multiple identities for malicious intent named after the famous multiple personality disorder patient "Sybil" (Shirley Ardell Mason).This particular attack has been used by spammers to create multiple websites with identical domain names with junk and gibberish content...Read More

Hosted content or themed link page is a page on a website written about your website or your client website. Unlike paid blogs here there is a dedicated page with an article that will have link to your webpage. Some SEO companies target sites to host a single page written about their website or client site and link it to the targeted sites...Read More

Three way linking, is a new way to spam the Search engine industry. It's a clever way of deceiving the search engines thinking that actually the links are not reciprocal but are one way links. What they do is, send a link request asking to link to a website which will be either their website or their client website and in exchange they will be willing to give a link from directory or some MFA site or some other site just created for 3 way links...Read More

Tiny text is the method of hiding text from users by making it as small as possible usually in the range of 1 to 20 pixels. When you add such tiny text on the pages it's virtually impossible to see with the naked eye. This is one of the oldest forms of spamming which has been there from the time search engines came into existence...Read More

Every webpage must have a Meta title. Meta title plays a significant role in the perception of any website. In internet Meta titles are used by directories, web resources, and webmasters when they link to your website or webpage. A catchy Meta title sums up the contents of your website...Read More

Trackbacks are a type of linkbacks which request notification when somebody links to one of their blog post or news post. Trackback helps in keeping the track of who links to us and who is referring their articles as part of the document. Top weblog programs like Wordpress, movable type and CMS platforms like Drula, TYPO use automated trackbacks...Read More

Using keywords in text is an important way to let the search engine know that a webpage or a website is related to a particular topic. Almost every SEO copywriter who writes for websites make sure they include important targeted keywords in their text. This helps the search engine know what the particular webpage or website is about...Read More

Video Optimization is a wonderful marketing strategy for your website as well as business. The whole concept of developing one's business using websites depends upon the quality of the website and the amount of traffic it derives. Making use of videos to derive traffic is a great optimization strategy for improving your website rank...Read More

Web widget is a software widget made especially for web applications. Web widget is a small application installed and executed within a webpage by the end user. Web Widgets are derived from the idea of code reuse. Terms that describe web widgets are portlet, gadget, badge, module, webjit, capsule, snippet, mini and flake...Read More

Wikis are web software that helps people to directly post their views and content without any censorship. With the invention of Wikipedia.com, Wikis had become very popular. We had the revolution of Wikipedia.com now we have wikileaks.ch. Wikis are free to download and use and more and more universities, non-profit organizations and common people are using wikis on their websites...Read More

Word Press is nothing but an open source blog tool and a publishing platform driven by PHP server side scripting language and MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS). Word press is usually customized into Content Management System (CMS)...Read More

Wordpress is one of the world's leading blogging / content management platform. Today millions of web publishers and bloggers use Wordpress. Wordpress is completely free to download and use and it comes with loads of features. When there are many good uses of Wordpress, there are ways to abuse the power of Wordpress...Read More

XSS stands for Cross-Site Scripting which is a type of computer security vulnerability found in web applications that enables spammers, hackers and other attackers to inject client side script into webpages viewed by other web surfers. It is generally used by attackers to bypass access controls...Read More

Yahoo Answers is a community driven Question and answer site launched by Yahoo. Yahoo Answers are an excellent place to get Answers to your questions. It's the largest Q & A community with about 100 million users. Yahoo Answers have been ranking high in the search results for a long period of time. Currently Yahoo Answers is ranked as the Second most popular Question and answer site on the web...Read More