Spamdexing, which is a word derived from “spam” and “indexing,” refers to the practice of search engine spamming. It is a form of SEO spamming. SEO is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization, which is the art of having your website optimized, or attractive, to the major search engines for optimal indexing. Spamdexing is the practice of creating websites that will be illegitimately indexed with a high position in the search engines. Sometimes, spamdexing is used to try and manipulate a search engine’s understanding of a category. The goal of a web designer is to create a web page that will find favorable rankings in the search engines, and they create their pages according the standards that they believe will help – unfortunately, some of them resort to spamdexing, unbeknown to the person who hired them.

Algorithms are used by the major search engines in order to figure out where to rank a website and figure out what keywords and category the website is relevant to. Some search engines base their rankings on the META TAG sections of the website; whereas, others simply look for keywords within the URL or content of the website. There are many techniques which are used to spamdex a site. They include creating superfluous backlinks(linking to higher ranked pages) and creating spam content – articles or comments that contain nonsense to a reader, but search engines will see relevant keywords. For example, if you see a post that says, “I went to the tree BUY VIAGRA the dog said hello VIAGRA FREE TRIAL . . .“ this is a good indication of an attempt at spamdexing. Thankfully, many search engines can detect this now, and they ban all sites from being indexed that are involved in spamdexing.

While spamdexing caused a lot of damage in the ways we find information on the internet, measures have been taken to curb it with some success. Spamdexing was a big problem in the 1990s, and search engines were fairly useless because they were compromised by spamdexing. Once Google came on the scene, that all changed – Google developed a page ranking system that fought against spamdexing quite well, discounting spam sites and awarding true, relevant websites with high page rankings.

While Google has offered a lot of hope, spamdexing continues on a marginal level. For example, Google Bombing has become a problem where one uses hyperlinks to manipulate a search engine through boosting relevancy of a spamdexing site, and diminishing the value of the host site.

Unfortunately, the fight against spam still continues . . .