Search Engine Optimisation UK & Spam.

Where to begin?

Probably with the basics.

In the easy old days, all you had to do to beat the engines about their dumb heads and make them understand what a page was about, was to put about a zillion keywords in a row and then put comment tags round it so it was invisible to the visitor. So a comment that looked like this
<!-- search engine optimisation uk search engine optimisation uk search engine optimisation uk search engine optimisation uk search engine optimisation uk search engine optimisation uk search engine optimisation uk -->
would appear like this

in other words, not at all. Easy, then, in those halcyon days, to stuff a page chock-a-block with related keywords and phrases without ruining your carefully worked-upon design.

Some folk who have a certain kind of mental illness spew out words in a seemingly random manner. It looks, on paper, like this;
"Word bell sky, thus lot. Divide, other music be run science. Arm her sound yes which. Last, better live draw, came, over wood. South press soon base whether too. Part, safe written. Self those equal pound. Can children music. Would solution bed. Difficult about town good verb. Yet open usual. Your, above, in equate. Sight near face, children sudden."
I got this, in fact, from my email this morning.

You might wonder, what's the point?
Well, in my email, perhaps not a lot. I suppose there's one but I can generally recognise these from the subject line so I just delete them and I've got no real interest in trying to work out what it is they're trying to sell me. Maybe there's some code buried in some of them that alerts the sender to the fact that the email has been opened so the address is active. Or something. But if you build it like this;
"Word bell sky, thus lot. Divide, other music be run science. Arm her search engine optimisation uk sound yes which. Last, better live draw, came, over wood. South press soon base whether too search engine optimisation uk. Part, safe written. Self those equal pound. Can search engine optimisation uk children music. Would solution bed. Difficult about town search engine optimisation uk good verb. Yet open usual. Your, above, in equate. Sight near face, children sudden."
I put the bold in to make the phrase stand out. Now to you and I the paragraph is obviously nonsense. Not so to a software spider, though, it looks just like a paragraph of material about search engine optimisation in the UK and that's the way the page'll be indexed. Again, you might say, why not just write a page on the subject? Because it's a lot easier to generate a whole lot of pages, using a program, containing the phrase of your choice, that will attract attention from searchers and once they click on your site you can then do all sorts with them. You could redirect them automatically to a site advertising the subject of your choice, or you could set it to lead to a directory of your choice including items like porn that a lot of people won't look for but will click on if they stumble across it. Not good.

Every image should have an alt text attribute in the code (alt="") in order to comply with W3C standards. What should really go in there is a description of the graphic for folk who can't see and are examining the site through a text screen reader like, for instance, Lynx. So the code for this, loosely speaking, would look like this <img src="search-engine-optimisation-uk.gif" alt="graphic featuring BB seated at his desk hard at work optimising another web site"> or similar. The spammed version would be along the lines of <img src="search-engine-optimisation-uk.gif" alt="search-engine-optimisation-uk search-engine-optimisation-uk search-engine-optimisation-uk search-engine-optimisation-uk search-engine-optimisation-uk search-engine-optimisation-uk">. It has to be said that there was a time when that would work, these days the engines don't index the alt content of image tags unless the image is a link.

It's widely accepted that the engines, who need after all to have some reliable indication of what the content of a page is actually about, lend great weight to the words contained in the H or Header tags. On this page (the one you're reading now) the primary H tag, the H1 tag, contains the words "Search Engine Optimisation UK & Spam". This is one way of telling the engines that the page is about Search Engine Optimisation (which I do primarily for the UK market) and spam.
That's all it needs to be.
Some people make the mistake of hiding the H tags from the viewer in one of the many ways this can be done (comment spam, noscript spam etc.) and then cramming loads of keywords in them. This does no good at all even if the engines do actually index the content of the tags (under those circumstances normally they won't) as if the key phrases are taken from the site as a whole and then crammed into one tag the content becomes so diffuse it loses all focus. If instead of what I already have I took content from all the other pages on my site and put keywords from that content into the H tags then they might look like this; <H1> search engine optimisation uk link popularity spam keyword research validation submissions hoarding page rank <H1>. If they do that, then how does an engine know what the page is supposed to be about? Is it about search? Is it about validation? Is it about submission? Keeping it simple is the way to go in an H tag, cramming it with every keyword you can think of is the worst thing to do.

Web sites that use frames for navigation, ironically enough, often cause navigation problems for older browsers or browsers with the frames option turned off. To offer a means to counteract this, html contains the noframes tag, which goes in the main frame and can be used to advise the visitor that they need to use a frames-enabled browser to view the site. This is often abused by spammers who have been known to put in a noframes tag even where frames are not present, and stuff it full of keywords and phrases as described above.

Web sites that use Javascripts can often find themselves rendered totally unusable as a determined hard-core of users insist on surfing with javascript turned off. To explain why a site seems to be totally useless, therefore, the noscript tag is bought into play. Again, as above, it's common spam practice to include keyword-stuffed noscript tags even where no Javascripts are present on a site.

Invisible text, which is legion on the web, is quite simply text that is the same colour as the background. So you can't see it. You can, though, if you hold down Control and press A. Try it - see what I mean?

Think keyword-stuffed text, great big wodges of it, positioned behind a graphic where you can't see it. Or positioned off to the left of the page on the screen, in cyberspace, where an engine can see it, but you can't. Or above the page, or below it. Anywhere but in that page that you can view through your browser.

Very simply, if the search engine spider from Google comes to your site (it's called Googlebot, by the way), you feed it pages specifically designed to be successful in Google's engine. When the search engine spider from Yahoo comes along (Slurp), you feed it pages specifically designed to succeed in Yahoo. Same with all the other engines. This is called cloaking. It's complicated and difficult as you have to set up and maintain programs that recognise each of the engines' spiders and you have to be sure they'll get fed the appropriate pages. I don't have anything to do with it. The point of it is that you get an extra advantage in that you can appeal specifically to many engines at once. And, of course, you may wish to manifest that your site is about Kylie in her knickers when it is in fact about the merits of ball-bearing manufacture in the Balkans. According to pages indexed in the engines, the delights of Kylie await. upon your arrival, panting, with your browser, the site software detects that this is not an engine's spider calling but instead a genuine visitor, so it serves up the content that all the while you were intended to see. This can actually be a lot nastier than it sounds. Suppose you were deep in debt and, needing solace, seeking to lose yourself in pursuit of your flower-arranging hobby. Coming across a promising new site in the engines, you go to it and find that you're being offered all manner of debt consolidation services. Or hard core porn. Or bestiality. Or whatever, stuff you'd heard about but would never normally look for. Something of that nature you'd think the engines would come down on heavily, and in my experience, generally (but not always) they do.

Invisible text, in this case. is generated by the CSS value visibility: none;. It works the same as all the other invisibles; you can't see it!

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