As an SEO, when I hear the word Spam I automatically think of Search Engine Spam. The funny thing is when I say the word spam in the company of anyone other than SEO or SEO knowledgable people, they NEVER think of search engine spam, in fact they don’t know what I’m talking about!
As unreal as it seems to me, when hearing the word Spam, the general population seems to think first of the canned variety, second of the email variety, and generally have never heard of the search engine spam at all.
Despite the apparent popularity, or lack of, I find it too risky to eat or pratice any form of spam, so I steer clear, but I think discussing each is okay.
1) Canned Spam is a canned shaped meat made by Hormel, that apparently many people actually eat - and like.
Now, Hormel obviously feels that history of spam is of great significance, so much so that in Sept. 2001, they opened a SPAM Museum! If you are a spam fan, you can visit them at 1937 SPAM Boulevard Austin, Minnesota. Unreal, honestly.
(I do not eat spam, and after reading the ingredients, I do not recommend it.)
2) Email Spam is all that unsolicited “junk mail” that graces your email Inbox or Spambox everyday.
I would think everyone would be completely annoyed by this junk (it certainly annoys everyone I know), but apparently some people like it.
I get these every few minutes and for the life of me I can’t imagine why anyone would open these emails, but apparently some people do. I mean if NOBODY fed into this spam, their breed would eventually die out, wouldn’t it? So, who is feeding this breed?
(I do not feed or participate in email spam, and I do not recommended it especially sense the latter can land you to jail.)
3) Search Engine Spam, commonly known as Black Hat SEO, is the practice of “tricking” the search engines for the purpose of falsely inflating a website’s rankings.
These tricks include things like: hidden text, hidden links, doorway pages, sneaky redirects, cloaking (showing different pages to the search engines than to your visitor), keyword stuffing, and mirror domains. There are more, but that pretty much covers the basics.
This deliberate skewing of the SERPS (search engine results pages) to favor undeserving sites really erks the search engines and puts the ‘offending’ sites in a position where it may be penalized or banned. Google in particular is on an all out anti-spam campaign.
There is a whole breed of SEOs, commonly known as Black Hats, who practice this form of spamming. They are, of course, well aware of the risk involved and most (if not all) have had their own sites and/or their clients sites hammered at one time or another.
So why do they do it? The purpose, of course, is forcing a site up in the rankings sooner or higher than it might have gone without the spam techniques. Some SEOs spam for the thrill of it, some spam for the money involved in being able to quickly get top rankings for extremely competitive markets. Does it work - yep, a lot of times it does (blame the search engines for that!). It is important to remember though, any time you spam your site or allow anyone else to do so, your site is at very serious risk of being banned or penalized. It just isn’t worth it in my book, especially for any legit business.
(I do not practice search engine spam, nor do I recommend it to anyone who thinks long term.)
So does being a spammer make one a scammer? Well, that depends.
