What is search engine spam?
- Search Engine Spam: Excessive manipulation to influence search engine rankings, often for pages which contain little or no relevant content.
- SEO spam, also known as spamdexing, is the attempt to manipulate search indexes so that they include content they otherwise wouldn’t. Black Hat SEOs want to spam search engine results with content that doesn’t deserve either to be included at all or included in a prominent position.
- Search engine spam refers to measures that try to influence the position a website has in search engines. When search engines discover search engine spam on a website, that site is penalized.
SEO spam is a combination of spam links, keywords, and other phrases that get inserted into a website. Spam link or broken link or lost links all are the same.
If someone wants to search a particular website but it may not redirect to any page, it will be termed as broken link or 404 error. If someone no longer refers to your site to rank on search engines, it is called lost link.
It may include a link to another website that contains further spam, or other content that search engines might not want to index. People do this to increase website visits and show them another spam link there. They are trying just to get visitors away from your website, to a website they want to promote. They appear (or pretend) like they are selling some product or service. They appear as clickbait websites, sometimes asking people to enter OTP, Debit card details, credit car details which leads to monetary loss. Also, it is seen that people buy something from such websites, but the product never gets shipped.
This is referred to as SEO spam because it is usually crafted in a way that targets specific keywords. Those keywords are around a link, which is the one the attacker is trying to push search engines or users. This technique helps the spam website rank higher in search engines for those specific keywords. It might not be indexed at all but as long as they get enough visitors from compromised websites, they might get indexed for a day or a week or sometime. They gain high rank, but eventually, Google notices that this site is not legitimate. And eventually, indexed sites get de-indexed completely from the search engine.