By David Gikandi, Founder, SearchPositioning.com
[April 17th, 1999]

See Also   Email Marketing Primer   How to Increase Your Online Sales   Take Advantage of Google's AdWords   Using Foreign Search Engines to Boost Your Sales   Getting Sure Profits Through Google, Goto.com and DirectHit   Ten Places You Must Submit Your Site   Clever Profit Growth Software   The Power Of Personalized Email   How To Go Long With Your Web Marketing   How NOT to Promote Your E-business   Winning the Search Engine Wars   Latest Tips on Search Engine Marketing   Are You Wasting Your Money Online?   Should I Hire Another Salesperson or Invest in an Affiliate Program?   The Death of Positioning?   Links: Why You Need Them and How to Get Them   Your #1 Overlooked Business Asset

Before getting started on using gateway pages and other HTML techniques to improve your search engine ranking, you need to know a little about spam and spamdexing. Spamming the search engines (or spamdexing) is the practice of using unethical or unprofessional techniques to try to improve search engine rankings. You should be aware of what constitutes spamming so as to avoid trouble with the search engines.

For example, if you have a page with a white background, and you have a table that has a blue background and white text in it, you are actually spamming the Infoseek engine without even knowing it! Infoseek will see white text and see a white page background, concluding that your background colour and your page colour are the same so you are spamming! It will not be able to tell that the white text is actually within a blue table and is perfectly legible. It is silly, but that will cause that page to be dropped off the index. You can get it back on by changing the text colour in the table to, say, a light grey and resubmitting the page to Infoseek.

See what a difference that makes? Yet you had no idea that your page was considered spam! Generally, it is very easy to know what not to do so as to avoid being labelled a spammer and having your pages or your site penalised. By following a few simple rules, you can safely improve your search engine rankings without unknowingly spamming the engines and getting penalised for it.

What constitutes spam?

Some techniques are clearly considered as an attempt to spam the engines. Where possible, you should avoid these:

• Keyword stuffing. This is the repeated use of a word to increase its frequency on a page. Search engines now have the ability to analyse a page and determine whether the frequency is above a "normal" level in proportion to the rest of the words in the document.

• Invisible text. Some Webmasters stuff keywords at the bottom of a page and make their text colour the same as that of the page background. This is also detectable by the engines.

• Tiny text. Same as invisible text but with tiny, illegible text.

• Page redirects. Some engines, especially Infoseek, do not like pages that take the user to another page without his or her intervention, e.g. using META refresh tags, CGI scripts, Java, JavaScript, or server side techniques.

• Meta tags stuffing. Do not repeat your keywords in the Meta tags more than once, and do not use keywords that are unrelated to your site's content.

• Never use keywords that do not apply to your site's content.

• Do not create too many doorways with very similar keywords.

• Do not submit the same page more than once on the same day to the same search engine.

• Do not submit virtually identical pages, i.e. do not simply duplicate a Web page, give the copies different file names, and submit them all. That will be interpreted as an attempt to flood the engine.

• Code swapping. Do not optimise a page for top ranking, then swap another page in its place once a top ranking is achieved.

• Do not submit doorways to submission directories like Yahoo!

• Do not submit more than the allowed number of pages per engine per day or week. Each engine has a limit on how many pages you can manually submit to it using its online forms. Currently these are the limits: AltaVista 1-10 pages per day; HotBot 50 pages per day; Excite 25 pages per week; Infoseek 50 pages per day but unlimited when using e-mail submissions.

  Please note that this is not the total number of pages that can be indexed, it is just the total number that can be submitted. If you can only submit 25 pages to Excite, for example, and you have a 1000 page site, that's no problem. The search engine will come crawling your site and index all pages, including those that you did not submit.

More: Be careful! Watch out for these "gray" areas...