Search Engine Optimization
By in SEO on 6th October 2007How Does Spamdexing Affect A Searcher?
Most of us at some point of time or the other have had our grouse against search engines. Today, how many of us go to the library to research something or to look up some information? All we do is to bring up the search engine bar and type whatever we want into it. Once we do that, what comes up and hundreds and thousands of results. Or possibly more. You’re overjoyed and hurry to click on the ones listed on the first page. Do you find tons of information on the subject you were looking for? Or do you just find a lot of gibberish on the sites you open? Well, most people think they’ve been wrong about the way they typed in their search words so they go back and try and it’s the same old nonsense that comes up again. This happens everywhere. For a nugget of good information, you have a sea of…well, spamdex. Maybe that library is a better place to go to after all!
It’s the bane of the Internet today and spamdexing is posing huge problems for search engines too. It’s a name that came into being in 1996 when Eric Convey wrote an article for The Boston Herald called ‘Porn sneaks way back on Web’. It refers to the use of methods in order to manipulate the resources which are indexed by the search engine and it manipulates things in a manner which is quite inconsistent with the indexing systems guidelines. The ones who use it – and they are known as the spamdexers – take advantage of search engines, ignoring the respected forms of SEO. They use so many techniques and ensure that their websites are listed in the first two pages of the search results and more often than not, the pages bear very little resemblance to the subject of the original search.
The search engines are unhappy too because they really do want genuine web sites in order to attract genuine users. They realize that it can add hours of frustration to what should really be a simple search. And they are doing all they can to try and eliminate the problem. Google declared war on them in January this year, especially on the ones that were specialists in Google bombing and many have rewritten their web crawlers’ algorithms so that keyword stuffing becomes difficult and they reject any website that just contains lists of keywords. What search engines would be glad of would be for users to report any website that is guilty of spamdexing. This would make it easier for them to kick these sites off their list.
Leave a Reply