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Keyword Spam

Keyword spam is the excessive repetition of keywords on a page. It is usually done using 'hidden' elements that are indexed by search engines but are not visible to users including Title, Meta, and Alt. Black-hatters have found that they can disguise keywords in the contents of the page by making the text the same color as the background and tucking it away at the bottom of the page. However this still takes up space so may be noticed by competitors, particularly if they type CTRL-A to highlight all the text on a page. It is also possible for search engines to detect text which is the same color as the background and this could flag that the page is using spammy techniques. MSN Search claims to automatically penalize these pages.

An extension on the hidden text idea is to hide the keyword spam using style-sheets (CSS). This gives the spammer great scope for stuffing keywords into important elements such as Headings without them being noticed. The following style will format all Heading 1 text as 1pt high white text.

H1 {
font-size : 1pt;
color : white;
}

There are many other ways of hiding content from users such as Layers and IFrames while still having it visible to search engines. Remember that it is possible to detect the most obvious examples of spam although forcing search engines to parse style sheets and other structures slows down indexing so few, if any, search engines currently do this.

Reporting Spam

If you spot a competitor using obviously spammy techniques you can report them. Google and Yahoo! have web pages that let you specify the exact nature of the problem you have found.

Google <http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html>

Yahoo! <http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_reportsearchspam>

Obviously they won't ban sites where there is no contravention so don't waste time reporting all your competitors.

Keyword Spam

Reporting Spam

See Also