Types of Spam

If a search engine representative discovers that a web site owner is deliberately trying to trick the search engines into giving a page higher relevance than it deserves, the individual page, or even the entire site, can be penalized. Most of the time, a search engine engineer modifies the algorithm so that the spam pages no longer appear at the top of search results. In more extreme cases, the page itself, or the whole site, is removed from the search engine index. Therefore, avoid the types of spam discussed in the following sections.

Promoting Keywords That Are Not Related to Your Web Site

To gain top search engine visibility, many spammers place words on their web pages that are not related to the pages’ actual content. For example, many people take the most popularly searched-for words (such as “sex” or a celebrity name) and place those words inside a meta tag. This is done only because the word is popular, not necessarily because the word relates to the content of a web page.