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Search
Engine Optimisation Web Log (BLOG)
Editor: Matt Paines |
This News Blog is dedicated to bringing news, information and innovations targeting
the Search Engine Optimisation industry. What
is spam and will you get caught using it?A recent client
received the following message from Google.
Dear site owner or webmaster of ********.com, While
we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your
pages were using
techniques that were outside our quality guidelines,
which can be found here:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
In order to preserve the
quality of our search engine, we have
temporarily removed some webpages from
our search results. Currently
pages from ********.com are scheduled to be
removed for at least 30
days. Specifically, we detected
the following practices on your webpages: * The following hidden
text on *********.com: e.g.
****************************************
... We would prefer to have your pages in Google's index. If
you wish to be
reincluded, please correct or remove all pages that are outside
our
quality guidelines. When you are ready, please visit: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/reinclusion?hl=en to
learn more and request a reinclusion request.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
| The offending passage was
a layer placed by a previous SEO, the layer was placed -1000px left and -1000px
up. This begs the question are Google's spiders able to identify such hidden content
or does someone have to report it? It would not be difficult for Google or any
spider to identify such practices.
For example the htm code for such activities
are the following <div
id="Layer1" style="position:absolute; width:200px; height:115px;
z-index:10; left: -1000px; top: -1000px;">text</div>
<div
align="center"></div> | the critical give
away is the script left: -1000px; top: -1000px this signifies the layer is off
the edge of the screen. So setting up a filter to identify such activity and filter
on it would be fairly easy. So what about hidden text- you know the white
on white. All the search engine has to do is look at the background colour and then look at the font colour <font
color="#FFFFFF">text</font> | again
not difficult. Then there is the hidden links set in a 1px by 1px image,
the code for which is | a
href="http://www.spam.com"><img src="transparent.gif"
alt="spam, spam, spam" width="1" height="1" border="0"> |
so for a search engine to filter for width="1" height="1",
For a long time the search engines relied on their spammer reporting service,
where webmasters could report spam activity. If indeed Google has been building
such spam filters, and given how easy it is to identify, it would be a missed
opportunity if they didn't, then the chances of getting away with employing content
spam, hidden content etc is reducing fast... So what is spam and will you
get caught? the answer is simple, spam is anything put on the page to influence
search engines, not visitors. Particularly if the search engine spider is the
only one that can see it. M.P |  |
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