Search Engine Journal

SEO & Search Engine SPAM Identifiers

Sure, it’s tempting to put together a keyword seeded site, URL, and folder system to try to rank highly in some of the search engines which are now, or have a history of ranking such sites in their top results. But as a long term search and site identity marketing plan, doing so may interfere with site linkability and the site being labeled as search engine spam in the future.

Aaron Wall put together a nice little list of obvious SPAM indicators to stay away from in his post, Quick Indications of Low Quality Search Spam.

Here are some examples:

* URL name - does it have 12 dashes in it? Is it a subdomain off something totally unrelated? SPAM!
* folder names - are the exceedingly long and/or redundant? SPAM!
* file names - are they redundant with the file paths and long? SPAM!
* page titles, headers and content - are they so keyword rich that it is illegible? SPAM!