Spamdexing

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Spamdexing or search engine spamming is the practice of deliberately creating web pages which will be indexed by search engines in order to increase the chance of a website or page being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned. Many designers of web pages try to get a good ranking in search engines and design their pages accordingly. The word is a portmanteau of spamming and indexing.

Spamdexing refers exclusively to practices that are dishonest and mislead search and indexing programs to give a page a ranking it does not deserve. "White hat" techniques for making a website indexable by search engines, without misleading the indexing process, are known as search engine optimization (SEO). SEO techniques do not involve deceit.

Search engine spammers, on the other hand, are generally aware that the content that they promote is not very useful or relevant to the ordinary internet surfer. Search engines use a variety of algorithms to determine relevancy ranking. Some of these include determining whether the search term appears in the META keywordsbody text of a web page. A variety of techniques are used to spamdex (see below). Many search engines check for instances of spamdexing and will remove suspect pages from their indexes. tag, others whether the search term appears in the

The rise of spamdexing in the mid-1990s made the leading search engines of the time less useful, and the success of Google at both producing better search results and combating keyword spamming, through its reputation-based PageRank link analysis system, helped it become the dominant search site late in the decade, where it remains. While it has not been rendered useless by spamdexing, Google has not been immune to more sophisticated methods either. Google bombing is another form of web vandalism, which involves creating pages that directly affect the rank of other sites[1].

Spamdexers may act as consultants, to help other web publishers drive up their sites' ranks using black-hat techniques. Alternatively, they may set up sites of their own that benefit from misleadingly-high rankings -- for instance, creating thousands or millions of landing pages containing links for which the spammer earns a commission whenever the user clicks.

Common spamdexing techniques can be classified into two broad classes: content spam and link spam.