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» Spamdexing » History of Spam » Search Engine Spam in news

Define: Spamming is the act of sending unsolicited, bulk (and usually commercial) electronic messages. Though this can be done through any number of media, the most common are e-mail and SMS.

The most common purpose for spamming is advertising. Goods commonly advertised in spam include pornography, computer software, medical products such as Viagra, credit card accounts, and fad products. Spamming is broadly considered unacceptable behavior by Internet service providers and indeed most Internet users. Users find spam annoying and its contents frequently offensive; Internet service providers object to the unrecoupable cost of processing other people's advertisements. Surveys have indicated that spam is one of most users' greatest annoyances about the Internet today.

Types of Spam

1. E-mail Spam
2. Messaging Spam
3. Usenet Spam
4. Spamdexing (Search Engine Spam)
5. Blog Spam
6. Cell phone Spam
7. Non-commercial Spam

The most common and hazardous type of spam and which needs attention of whole community is SPAMDEXING.

Spamdexing, or search engine spamming, is the manipulation of search engine inputs in order to give a Web site a higher relevance ranking than it would on its merits. Search engine operators consider this practice abusive, and have in several instances adjusted their indexing methods to count spamdexed pages lower in an effort to stem the practice.

Search engine spamming is unlike other forms of spamming in that it does not involve directing unauthorized messages to another party's network resources. However, it does involve intentional deception or manipulation of a public utility (the search engine) and for this reason; many consider it a comparable abuse.

Techniques of Spamdexing

There are 16 techniques discussed that are considered spam by search engines:

1. Keywords unrelated to site
2. Redirects
3. Keyword stuffing
4. Mirror/duplicate content
5. Tiny Text
6. Doorway pages
7. Link Farms
8. Cloaking
9. Keyword stacking
10. Gibberish
11. Hidden text
12. Domain Spam / multiple domains or subdomains
13. Hidden links
14. Mini/micro-sites
15. Page Swapping (bait &switch)
16. Typo Spam and Cyber Squatting

Others: Graphic images with irrelevant results, identity theft/page jacking, bad neighborhoods

Difference between Spam and Spamdexing

As the most prevalent form of Spam- the nuisance is e-mail spam, there is another type of spam which targets Search Engine Results and known as Spamdexing.

"Spamdexing or search engine spamming is the practice of deliberately and dishonestly modifying HTML pages to increase the chance of them being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a dishonest manner. Many designers of web pages try to get a good ranking in search engines and design their pages accordingly. ..."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing

In e-mail spam the e-mail spammer has a contact with the user through a spam filter. But, for web spammers the rendezvous is the search engine.

E-mail spamming requires inputs from the spammer alone: spammer makes the spam mail and sends it to the user. Whereas, web spamming requires input from both the spammer and the search engine, i.e. spammer makes web pages with spammed info and search engine shows them in their search engine pages.

Both are an equally punishable offense because at the end of the day they create a nuisance for the end user. E-mail spam provides the user with the advertisements for the products in which he is not interested. In contrast, web spam provides either repeated or irrelevant info to the user. Hence, both should be dealt strictly.