By David Gikandi, Founder, SearchPositioning.com
[April 17th, 1999]

See Also   Email Marketing Primer   How to Increase Your Online Sales   Take Advantage of Google's AdWords   Using Foreign Search Engines to Boost Your Sales   Getting Sure Profits Through Google, Goto.com and DirectHit   Ten Places You Must Submit Your Site   Clever Profit Growth Software   The Power Of Personalized Email   How To Go Long With Your Web Marketing   How NOT to Promote Your E-business   Winning the Search Engine Wars   Latest Tips on Search Engine Marketing   Are You Wasting Your Money Online?   Should I Hire Another Salesperson or Invest in an Affiliate Program?   The Death of Positioning?   Links: Why You Need Them and How to Get Them   Your #1 Overlooked Business Asset

[This is the second part of a two part article. The first part can be read here].

Grey Areas

There are certain practices that can be considered spam by the search engine when they are actually just part of honest Web site design. For example, Infoseek does not index any page with a fast page refresh. Yet, refresh tags are commonly used by Web site designers to produce visual effects or to take people to a new location of a page that has been moved. Also, some engines look at the text colour and background colour and if they match, that page is considered spam. But you could have a page with a white background and a black table somewhere with white text in it. Although perfectly legible and legitimate, that page will be ignored by some engines.

Another example is that Infoseek advises against (but does not seem to drop from the index) having many pages with links to one page. Even though this is meant to discourage spammers, it also places many legitimate Webmasters in the spam region (almost anyone with a large Web site or a Web site with an online forum always has their pages linking back to the home page). These are just a few examples of grey areas in this business. Fortunately, because the search engine people know that they exist, they will not penalise your entire site just because of them.

What are the penalties for spamdexing?

There is an inappropriate amount of fear over the penalties of spamming. Many Webmasters fear that they may spam the engines without their knowledge and then have their entire site banned from the engines forever. That just doesn't happen that easily! The people who run the search engines know that you can be a perfectly legitimate and honest Web site owner who, because of the nature of your Web site, has pages that appear to be spam to the engine. They know that their search engines are not smart enough to know exactly who is spamming and who happens to be in the spam zone by mistake. So they do not generally ban your entire site from their search engine just because some of your pages look like spam. They only penalise the rankings of the offending pages. Any non-offending page is not penalised.

Only in the most extreme cases, where you aggressively spam them and go against the recommendations above, flooding their engine with spam pages, will they ban your entire site. Some engines, like HotBot, do not even have a lifetime ban policy on spammers. As long as you are not an intentional and aggressive spammer, you should not worry about your entire site being penalised or banned from the engines. Only the offending pages will have their ranking penalised.

Is there room for responsible search engine positioning?

Yes! Definitely! In fact, the search engines do not discourage responsible search engine positioning. Responsible search engine position is good for everybody - it helps the users find the sites they are looking for, it helps the engines do a better job of delivering relevant results, and it gets you the traffic you want!

As a Webmaster, you should not be too afraid that you are spamming the search engines in your quest for higher search engine rankings. No question about it, though, spam is something that every Webmaster should understand thoroughly. Fortunately, it is easy to understand it. So learn the rules, re-examine your Web pages, resubmit to the engines, then create gateway pages to get better ranking on the engines, using the rules above. If you need any more information on search engine spamming and search engine positioning, see http://www.searchpositioning.com. I wish you the best of fortune in your Web promotional efforts!