The "Secrets" of Spamdexers

Have you ever looked at a web site and wondered why some things looked a little funny? Maybe you have seen what looked like the end of a page, but you could scroll another two or three screens before you really got to the bottom of the page. Well, in some cases, there is a little bit of deception going on that the webmaster does not want you to know about. They try to hide it with a number of blank screens, or inside comment tags....which do not show up at all.

The driving force behind this deception is a top ranking in the search engines. As we all know, everyone would like to have their site viewed by as many people as possible. When it comes to making money, the temptation to get those extra visitors can be enormous. So, when a site wants to attract a large number of visitors, the webmaster will try to improve his search engine placement. At times, the webmaster resorts to methods called "Spamdexing" or "Spoofing".

Spamdexing is an attempt to try to "fool" a search engine into giving a web page a higher ranking on keywords that people would find the site with. This is typically done by repeating a few keywords over and over, sometimes reaching thousands of repetitions. Why make such a long list of keywords? Well, a long list is quick and easy. Long lists don't take much thought and do not require that the webmaster consider how the site design will be affected by the list. As I said earlier, the list is either completely hidden or below the important part of the page. So what are some of these tricks? Let's start with an old one.....which doesn't work too well anymore. Search engines are cracking down on these spamdexing tricks, so don't try any of these spamdexing tricks on your site! If you do, you could have your site penalized or completely removed from the listings!

The old "hide a list of keywords inside comment tags" trick has been around for some time. The idea is simple...many of the search engines index comment tags because it may help determine what the site is about. Well, by creating comment tags with the same words repeated dozens of times, a high ranking in a search for those words would be certain. Let's say your site is about web design (what a convenient choice!). To get a high ranking on a search for web design, you would just repeat those two words in your comment tags:

Now if you saw a web site ahead of you in the rankings doing this, you would likely be upset. What happens is that these sites battling for position will try to "out-repeat" each other to be on top. They can get really creative in finding ways to add more repetitions of the important keywords. Why not use this creativity to design the site properly AND get a high placement?

As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, you on occasion will come across a site with a large amount of space that appears to have nothing there....but you can scroll down two or three screens. What is usually happening is the "repeat the keywords in the same color as the background" trick. What they do is change the font color to match the background and use the smallest font size possible. Then they write in the keywords over and over......and it will look like blank space on the page:

Search engines have cracked down on this trick by penalizing sites that use text in the same color as the background. So be careful, you may even be doing a simple spacing trick, but a search engine may not like the same-color text and your site could get penalized.

Another spamdexing trick is to simply overload the meta tags, using an extremely long list of keywords in both the keywords and description tags. If you see a description of a site in a search engine like this:

Chances are pretty good you have found a spamdexer. You can tell pretty quickly by going to their site and viewing the html source. For starters, this site used the TITLE tag not only for their company title, but also as a keyword list. The list was so long that the search engine had to cut it off for the title to fit on the page correctly. You can also tell that their meta description tag was used as another place to stuff a list of keywords. Not only do these techniques make a listing look terrible, they are now likely to be removed from the listing for too many repetitions of the same words.

A variation of this is to not only stuff the title and meta tags with keywords, but to also repeat these tags over and over. I have seen pages that use 5 sets of title tags.....all with the same list of keywords. Their idea is that most search engines put more weight on the title tag for placement when they index a site. So, they use the title tags as a list of keywords. And then they use 5 title tags.....you would think one title would be sufficient....and without the list of keywords.

The next couple of tricks just make me laugh sometimes. One is the use of a fake form element.... yes, a HIDDEN form element. They just pour keywords into the hidden element and you won't see it without viewing the source code.

The next couple of tricks just make me laugh sometimes. One is the use of a fake form element.... yes, a HIDDEN form element. They just pour keywords into the hidden element and you won't see it without viewing the source code.

It looks like a complete waste of time to me, but I love to see some of the ridiculous name attributes they come up with. I have even seen one where they had name="trick". Most of the names are complete nonsense though.

I have also seen people just make up their own tags! Why? Because they can stuff the useless tag with keywords and it probably won't even show up in the page, especially if it uses an "!" to look like a comment tag. I saw one like this:

I don't even think the W3C has heard of that tag! Another waste of time as well, the site will simply be penalized for too many repetitions of those keywords.

This next trick can be legitimate, but some spamdexers carry it too far. The use of the "alt" attribute in an image tag is indexed by some search engines. It is a good idea to use this alt attribute to list a two or three keyword phrase, such as:

The tag above is a legitimate use of the alt attribute (the other legitimate use would be to describe the image). This will be indexed, but will not end up penalizing you for repetition..... unless you have already repeated these words too many times elsewhere.

Spamdexers use this tag for....you guessed it, a long list of keywords. Check out my broken image below and see how extreme it can get.

If you have a 4.0 browser, move your mouse over the image and see how large the box of alt text is......it's larger than the image! This just drives me insane .....I have gotten a box of alt text as big as my browser window, and all because someone wants to trick the search engines.

These tactics may frustrate you because a spamdexer cheating the search engines is ahead of you in the listings. You may be inclined to use their techniques to try to get your site ahead of theirs....but this just simply leads to a battle of who can cut 'n' paste the most repetitions of key search phrases, and both sites will lose in the end. If you want to get a better ranking, you need to be more creative and design your site to get a high ranking without spamdexing. You can do this, and you will probably beat the spamdexer if you use legitimate designing ideas to get a better placement. Spamdexers will only load their site with more keywords ....which will penalize them and put you ahead for good.

Should you do anything about spamdexers? Report them to search engines? Email them about their problems? My answer is NO. Why not? Well, I think the best thing to do is just ignore spamdexers. Remember, some of them do not even know they are not designing their site correctly. They learn spamdexing from "search engine tricks" pages, books, and word of mouth. In any case, the search engines will catch the spamdexing sooner or later, and the site will be gone. You don't need any more problems than you already have, and I know I already have enough to deal with myself.

If you want to stop spamdexing, write some articles on how to design your page for search engines the correct way! You will show webmasters a better technique before they learn how to spamdex, and save yourself a great deal of frustration!