Search engine spammer
A search engine spammer is a person or organisation that uses techniques that are deemed unfair in order to increase his/her web site's position within the search results of a search engine. Perhaps the best example of this activity is googlebombing, where many pages are made linking to the target page. This has the effect that the search engine (In this case Google, but Yahoo! and other popular search engines are also affected) believes that the target page is the most relevant to the search query (as the search query is the common denominator to all the pages linking to the target), and the target page appears higher in the results than its content may suggest.
This technique is usually kept to online jokes such as the famous googlebomb of Miserable Failure to the White House biography of George W. Bush. However, unscrupulous organisations (often businesses) use this technique to have their page or pages favourable to them appear in the list before competing or less favourable sites.
Techniques
- Cloaking
This is when a web site delivers one version of a page to a Internet surfer and a different version to a spider. There are various ways to deliver cloaking, it can be done by the server checking the User Agent name and by looking at the IP address of the visitor.
- Duplicate Content
Multiple web pages with the same content.
- Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing is when the same word is repeated over and over. This use to be a technique that search engines had a hard time figureing out, but today it's not as easy. If a word is repeated to often it may raise a red flag to the search engines and they may decide to ban or filter out the web page.
- Hidden text or hidden links
The text it's self cannot be seen on the web page by a visitor. The general technique is to hide the text behide a image or have the text color same as the background, so it can't be seen. However, this can be spotted by looking at the source code of the web page.