Characteristics of a Spammy Website

Spam could have a variety of definition depending on the application. For electronic mailing, spam emails are unwanted messages usually newsletters, press releases, product and service advertisements and marketing, or a virus program.

In website design and publishing, spam websites or spammy websites are websites that is intentionally designed to take advantage of the loop holes of search engine ranking algorithm to rank high in the search results. Spamming could be the upper boundary in search engine optimization practices. Some webmasters and Google itself consider an over optimized website as spammy.

At the least, for Google search engine’s point of view, the following are some characteristics of a spammy websites;
1. Excessive use of targeted keywords, usually in close proximity, repetitive, and not in a form of a good sentence.
2. Excessive keywords in the domain name and URL. For example, www.we-offer-cheap-consultancy-for-business-development.com.
3. Hiding targeted keywords. This can be done by making the font color and the background color the same.
4. Hiding text link. Implementation is the same as in number 2.
5. Excessive and unnatural interlinking of webpages, or probably, making a sitemap that links to all of the webpages. The main purpose of doing this is to make the page rank of all of the web pages closer to the pagerank of the index page.
6. Interlinking of owned domains. Though it is hard to trace, Google, for example, consider domains with same ip address as owned by a single webmaster.
7. Participating in a Free For All (FFA) submit websites and link farm and, maybe sometime in the future, link exchange program and gaining links from websites with unrelated content.
8. Websites that gain links from forums, guestbooks, and blog comments that are intentionally done by its webmaster.
9. Having excessive and unnaturally bold and very large font size of the content.

A good website design that is not spammy are those that are made for its readers and not for search engine ranking algorithm, and gain links naturally without the sole intention of gaining high pagerank.

Category Filed in: Search Engine -