Content spamming

Once upon a time, creating what is now considered “spam” content, or “spamdexing” (creating thin, keyword-stuffed webpages) used to be a black hat tactic to manipulate search engine rankings. Since Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, spamdexing has been removed from the modern SEO’s toolbelt; however, spam content still exists.

Generally one or more of the following techniques are used for content spamming:

• Doorway pages are stuffed with very similar keywords and phrases to rank high within the search results, but serve no real purpose to visitors looking for information. By scraping search-engine results pages (or objects), content for an entire website with doorway pages can be created. Such websites are generally full of advertising, or they redirect the user to other sites. Such sites can often outrank original websites.

• In article spinning, existing articles are rewritten by hired writers or automated using a thesaurus database or a neural network. Some sites are offered in different languages by using machine translation (the text are still detectable as unintelligible texts, but with the development of unsupervised ML for translation, soon undetectable).

• Objects offered on a site containing information unrelated to the title of the site is often taken as an attempt at deception. Yet it is a common practice in some types of sites, like dictionary and encyclopedia sites. This is an area with a lot of false positives.