Spamdexing
TL;DR
Spamdexing refers to the unethical practice of some websites to try to index and rank unrelated and irrelevant content in order to get higher traffic and to be more visible in the search engine result pages.
What is spamdexing?
Spamdexing, as the name itself, says, refers to spam and indexing in the search engines, and it is an unethical SEO practice that may end up with penalties from search engines. This means that websites practicing spamdexing include a lot of information on the pages in order to get indexed and rank higher in the search engine page result, but do not provide relevant or qualitative information for users.
Spamdexing can be easily spotted because the websites practice the following tactics:
- Add the same keyword or set of keywords tens or even hundreds of times on a page in an attempt to increase their visibility in the search engine. The keywords are usually added in a very uncommon matter, either at the bottom of the page or made invisible for the reader (by using the same colors for text as the site's background).
- Add completely unrelated keywords, only for the sake of high traffic - such as (the) Olympics, even though the site might sell entrepreneurship books.
- Violate the copyright law and use competitors' names (trademark, or even part of the content) in the site's meta-description and other meta-tags in order to capture the competition's traffic.
How to avoid spamdexing on a website?
Using keywords is highly important for a website's ranking and index coverage, but spamdexing is not the same thing as properly using them in the pages' text or meta tags, but a way to cheat both users and search engines. To avoid spamdexing, consider the following:
- Do the keyword research and add the most appropriate and important keyword and phrases in the headings, meta, and in the body text when it is actually relevant for the reader.
- Add internal links to keep the readers within site and link them to insightful content
- Avoid keyword stuffing
- Add alt-attributes within the content
- Build and submit the sitemap
- Create a strong backlink strategy.
