Any Spam on Your Site?

Most of us think of “spam” as all of those unwanted emails from casinos, porn, or drug sellers that fill up our mailbox. Actually, “spam” is a catch-all phrase that includes any kind of junk on the internet, including garbage webpage content and “black hat seo” schemes. Webmasters do plenty of it. Why? They want their site to rank well in Google search results. They would be better off offering good, fresh, relevant content. Google is getting pretty smart, and is getting smarter every day. Google can punish spammers with low rankings or removal from the index. Spammers get caught, eventually.

Have you ever Googled a keyword, only to find a site with your keyword in it, plus all kinds of nonsense combinations of words? That is an example of spam. Don’t worry. Google will find it eventually, and remove it from the index. Then the spammers will just create a few dozen more sites just like it.

Here are the most common forms of web spam:

1. Invisible text. This means stuffing the site with keywords that are the same color as the background. This one is very easy for Google to detect, and they will punish you for it. You might even get banned for it.
2. Unnatural text. Examples of this would be extremely long sentences stuffed with lots of commas and keywords. This is especially tempting for REALTOR webmasters who want to include a long list of cities for keywords. If you have some of this on your site, simply divide up the offending segment into more sentences. This is the easiest form of spam to create, and it is possible to do it unintentionally. I have been guilty of this myself.
3. Doorway pages. These are sites loaded up with lots of keyword dense links all pointing to the same page. Doorway farms can make your site disappear!
4. Pages with long lists of links can look spammy to Google.  Keep the number of links on any page relatively low.  Anything over 100 links per page is bad;  anything over 125 links is very bad.
5. Stuffed photo alt tags.  Keep your alt tags simple and related to the photo.  Don’t try to stuff long lists of keywords into them.

Here is a handy tool to detect the first three of these forms of spam.

http://tool.motoricerca.info/spam-detector/

Bookmark this link, and test your home page and all of your internal pages with it, as well.

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