Spam industry attacks search engines
30 March 2005
Spam is reportedly becoming an increasing problem on search engines, as well as blighting web users' email inboxes.
Searches on leading sites are coming up with irrelevant results more frequently, including websites that have nothing to do with the search topic, sites that only feature links to other sites or those that redirect searchers to another page.
The problem, dubbed "search-engine spam", has caught the attention of search engines and many are now banning the sites that are reported to deploy spamming techniques. Google and Yahoo! have online forms for Web surfers to report search-engine spam and getting banned from search engines can harm a company irreparably.
"All the same junk I'm getting in my inbox, I'm now getting in search engines," Dave Bixler, chief information security officer at Siemens Business Services, told the San Diego Union Tribune. "The reason spam is prevalent in your inbox is because it works. Same with search-engine spam."
Some websites use irrelevant keywords to get a high ranking, some have hidden text and doorway pages, and sometimes there is stuffing of keywords, but this is all now prohibited by search engines. Experts warn that not all search-engine spam is harmless and some pages trick users into visiting sites that contain malicious computer codes or install spyware onto computers.
Search engines use formulas that rank pages based on keywords in the text as well as the number of links to that site.
Apply for your free web assessment - get a complete health check and optimisation action plan from Weboptimiser, the experts.
Related news
|
|
Leading brand search engine marketing since 1996
Founded in 1996 as an SEO company, Weboptimiser is today one of the Internet marketing sector's best-known and most respected search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) search engine marketing companies.
With a unique portfolio of brand-friendly services, including usability, contextual advertising and web analytics, a pioneering methodology that covers all 4 stages of interaction between a web site and its visitors, we make our clients sites faster, smarter, busier and more profitable.
