Catching a bee in a forest full of bees - Unpredictable Search engines.

1. Blog Spamming: Spamming blog with comment spam most targeted sites were big University sites like Stanford.edu where they allowed people to post comment for their articles or news section
2. Aggressive / Automated Link exchanges: Aggressive Link exchanges were still working but not to the level it used to work around 2002 or 2003. Automated link exchanges became a huge industry and people were using very aggressive link exchanges to gain a upper hand in backlinks
3. Forum spamming: Spamming forums through signature links , links in their posts, links through automated forum spam etc. This was a very popular tactics where people just visit forums to have their links in signature or in their post to gain search engine benefit.






4. Cross-linking: A major search engine spam where a spammer starts 100s of sites and cross link them to get link benefit in search engines.
5. Dmoz clones: Huge number of dmoz clones started arising and became people since it can generate 100s of 1000s of pages instantly for search engines.
6. Directory spam huge number directories started coming out with zero value to visitors built just for search engine benefit
7. Links from lots of blogs. This was something which came into existing in 2004 but still in existence to a certain extent.
8. Links and contents hidden on page, behind images, in noscript tag, in hidden contents etc.
   
9. Spamming wikipedia by inserting links ( Nofollow was introduced mostly for wikipedia ) .
   
10. Text link ads: Buying your way to the top of search engine organic rankings. Buying text links and gaining search engine benefit due to the search engines dependency on backlinks and anchor text power to rank a website.
    

If I list it out I can keep on listing lots of things people used for spamming the search engines. But if you today most of the above tactics dont work anymore with search engines. Search engine like Google has closed its algorithm for these sort of loop holes. I can tell you with some sort of background with search algorithms. Just to close the above 8 tactics they need to implement 30 different factors. Its not that easy to detect a spam without hurting millions of websites out there who might have something similar to it but is not considered spam.

To combat these problems search engines role our algorithmic changes very carefully after a lot of testing so that it doesn't affect any search rankings of innocent webmasters who never did anything against search engine guidelines. At this point I can imagine atleast 150 factors playing into ranking competitive keywords in Google.

Lets see what's the 2007/2008 search engine spam tactic

Social bookmarking which has picked up so much these days has been a target of search engine spamming for sometime now. People want to bookmark only interesting pages but now everyone bookmarks everything. This is done mostly for search engine benefit. Search engines love sites like delicious or Digg and they tend to crawl links from these sites better. So people tend to target these sites.

Search Engine Spamming in the name of link baiting, Link baiting a very commonly used word these days has been a subject of abuse. People imagining to be creative use some really aggressive methods on their sites to gain natural backlinks. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't . Bad PR ( public relations ) is a main problem here. People tend to write crap about others or about other sites so that they can gain the sympathy of the other party. This is definitely not the healthy way for gaining back links.

Pay per post , pay for blogging – an other tactic which was subject to spamming . Now people are buying posts in blogs. They make good bloggers write about their site and provide a back link to them. Most of the time this is just like a paid text link advertisement.

Adding a page on a established site about your site with anchor text backlinks

Reviews on established blogs are similar to Pay per post where you pay a blogger to review your site and link back in return for Money.

1$ articles – This is a very difficult to combat spam where advertisers are paying 1$ for articles which are of very low quality and stuff their site with junk information to show search engines that they have contents.

This is just a small list of new ideas to spam search engines. I can go on to list more so we cannot blame the search engines in anyway for doing something like this.

One wonderful thing is the death of Anchor Text link advertising in 2007/2008. I am personally Happy about it. It makes the rich and famous dominate Search Results. Its not anymore the case. Search Engines dont see text link advertising as a search engine friendly one and are ready to impose strong penalties for sites that buy or sell links. Though Search engines like Google like to fight search engine spamming algorithmically I am sure some manual review especially on paid links or renting links will bring more success and quality to the index.

Considering all these new tactics coming up I am sure in future Search Engine Optimization is going to be one of the hardest industry to work on. Saying that if there are no innovating ideas to get a site ranked I am sure search engine quality engineers will go Jobless. So let us keep them working harder to fight search engine spamming algorithmically.

Search Engine Genie.

Labels: search engines