Spamdexing

Due to the widespread use of the Internet, business models have changed over the years. Instead of solely operating in a brick and mortar setting, businesses have extended their mode of operation to the electronic setting. As with the traditional means of doing business, competition is fierce in the electronic world. Website owners’ battle over page rankings in order to have more people know about their presence.

This has lead to various techniques and practices, which increase page rankings and promote websites. Though there are many techniques which are legitimate, there is what is known as spamdexing. Spamdexing is basically used to refer to the practice of creating web pages to increase page rankings without paying attention to the content or relevance of the site. Spamdexing, though known by all concerned as unethical and dishonest, is quite rampant today.

In order to spamdex a page, website creators have come up with a lot of techniques to increase their page ranking. One popular way to spamdex is to stuff pages with keywords. This in itself is not a bad thing. In fact, SEOs which are totally legitimate use this technique. However, in spamdexing, the pages themselves do not contain useful information. They are stuffed with so many keywords that oftentimes, the pages do not even make sense at all.

Another way to spamdex is to stuff metatags. This is similar to keyword stuffing except that the keywords are found in the metatags. In spamdexing, keywords need not be related to the site’s content.

Having mirror websites is another form of spamdexing. Different websites with different URLs but have the same content in them fall under this category. Spamdexing also covers URL redirections. These are instances wherein the user is taken to a different URL without him having to click on anything.

In order to combat spamdex, search engines have come up with complicated algorithms to determine a site’s page rank. Google is the forerunner in this respect. With their “intelligent” spiders, sites which make use of spamdexing cannot fool them by keyword stuffing and metadata stuffing. In order to circumvent spamdexing techniques, they have added extra stipulations such as the number of links (both incoming and outgoing). Search engines also assign weights to incoming links as a further measure in combating spamdexing.

Knowing the different practices and techniques employed in spamdexing will definitely help in avoiding such practices.

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