How To Detect Spam

[ihelpyou]

If a competitor of your's is ranked higher, especially on the 1st page of results, type this into your address bar:

view-source:http://www.yourcompetitordomainUrl.com

Whatever site you are checking, simply type the FULL Url.

You can quickly see if that site is feeding the search engine spiders something different than a visitor might see when going to the site.

You can view both source codes very easily.

Hope this helps you in catching sites that deceive the search engine spiders.

A competitor of mine was caught by someone. The site is always ranked just above mine on a good search term. Finally, this should not be the case anymore.

I HATE deceivers of the search engines.

<added>you have to type this first into the bar.... view-source:

and then the full Url</added>

That great tip was originally given by a lady named Vanessa Knight(Ness) over at the search engine forums.

[DJ5A]

Hello Everybody:

Another Great Tip from Doug!

This makes me think that I'm going crazy LOL, Because eveytime I go to a web site the first thing I do is do a Select all & see what is hidden or what is not suppose to be there. Hey I've learned a little about graphics this way.

Then I do a view source of the Web Page. I think habits like this are catchy, I just hope I do not find out another 2 or 3 things to do while there. :-)

[ihelpyou]

hey DJ...... well, I cannot take any credit for that tip as it came from:
www.searchengineforums.com from a moderator named Ness.

A great tip though and very useful in ANY site attempting to deceive.

[Blue]

Hey Doug,

I'm somewhat confused (although that seems to be the norm for me these days :rolleyes: ) in that I'm not sure what the thrust of your topic is.

Do you mean to advise us that we can report unethical SEO behaviour to someone (thereby disabling that persons chances of gaining higher rankings)? If so, to whom would we report this behaviour? And how effective is this practise?

Were you able to disable your competitors higher ranking?

Also, what do you mean by "both source codes" in the following:

You can view both source codes very easily.

Thanks in advance, to both you and Ness,

[ihelpyou]

Yes. If you sincerely see that a site is deceiving the search engines, you can report them to the engine by looking for an email address on the search engine's site.

No, I did not report anyone but someone else did.

They were using other's content on the page and with a quick javascript re-direct, they were hiding that fact.

Viewing both source codes:

When typing in a Url, you can view the source of the actual First page. While viewing that source, you can then view the source of the page you end up on.

If the source codes are different, you can see how they are different. Many times the original link(or code) has deceiving text or code in it.

In other words, the original page has code in it specifically for the spiders to improve ranks, and is not intended to be seen by actual visitors to the site.

[Blue]

Aha! Now I see... :D

Thanks for the clarification.

[Farhan]

If the same site with even similar domain names like

www.abc.com and www.a-b-c.com appears for a competitive keyowrd with same content, is it known as spam? if yes, then how can we report this to Google? will they take any action!!

[ihelpyou]

Yes, but make the email short and to the point and show them the proof. Email address is:

search-quality@google.com

[Farhan]

:up: Thanx Doiug

I have done my work!
How often should i remind them if i see no response?

[ihelpyou]

Never, as they read all email the first time. Just might take a long time to make changes if they decide to.

[Alan Perkins]

This may be a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, but:

www.abc.com and www.a-b-c.com appears for a competitive keyowrd with same content, is it known as spam?Not necessarily! There are loads of reasons this might happen. Only some of them are spam.

Is it the exact same content at both sites? Do both sites have the same IP address? If the answer to both these questions is "yes", it is the SE's mistake. Both domain names are simply pointed at the same IP address. This is often done for hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions of the same domain.

Even if the two domains have different IP addresses, the domain owner could quite legitimately be moving from one ISP to another.

Quick check for the IP address of a site:

1) Open a DOS prompt
2) ping -a www.domain.com
3) The IP address of the pinged site will be listed

[ihelpyou]

Yes, but I have found that a site is promoting both Url's even if on the same IP. To me, it is spam. Many times, the site does not understand what they are doing. I also have many domains that point to my site, but do not promote them. You can have as many domains as you wish to point, but only promote one of them online. Otherwise, it looks like spam to anyone else. Knowledge is often the reason behind this.

[Alan Perkins]

If I were you, Doug, I would have these domain names pointing at this site:

www.i-help-you-services.com
www.ihelpyouservices.com

Note I've taken the URL parsing off so as not to create hyperlinks to those. That's because I'm friendly. But anybody could link to any domain name they knew you owned, even if you chose not to "promote" it yourself, and spiders would pick them up. Some spiders may even pick up seed URLs from domain registrars. I know that many use Internet cache logs, which may contain URLs you have "tested" even though you don't promote them.

Two domain names pointing at the same content on the same IP is not spam. You need to know more than that to label it as such, IMO.

[ihelpyou]

No, I did not say that. I said that you should Not promote them. The engines can tell if you are promoting or not. Submitting is promoting. I would not point ihelpyouservices to these forums as that root is being developed now. I have never promoted it anywhere and will not do so till I am done building it.

Yes, spiders do pick up newly registered domains. But, as long as you do not promote them, you are fine.

[ihelpyou]

All I am saying Alan is that I talk to MANY owners who own a few domains. They could not understand why they could not have numerous domains in the search engines all pointing to one site. I have explained this on many occasions to them. This is what I mean,... knowledge is the key here. If promoting these, it is spam.

[ihelpyou]

We are both "preaching to the choir" here, but hopefully it is helping viewers who need this knowledge. :)

[Alan Perkins]

Agreed, Doug, it may be spam. But I don't think there was enough in Farhan's original post to say whether it was or not.

For me, the only warning flag was that it was Google that listed both sites. Google is pretty good at picking up the kind of duplication I'm talking about. So there's a good chance that it is spam.

[Kal]

I'm with Alan on this one. I own both the hyphenated and unhyphenated version of HSER and I bought both so that I could (eventually) have both pointing to the same site.

The reason? Not spam at all. The hyphenated version is for submitting to search engines (with the hyphens helping engines detect individual keywords within the domain) and the unhyphenated version (when I finally get around to redirecting it!) is for marketing purposes and will appear on all my stationery etc because it's much easier for customers to remember an unhyphenated version.

As far as I know, as long as I don't submit the unhyphenated version to the engines, I'll be ok right?

Also my WR site (targeting Aust/NZ market only) points to the same site for both .com.au and .co.nz versions, but I needed both because some New Zealand search engines require a nz domain for submission and same with some Aust engines and I have offices in both countries.

[edited just to make it perfectly clear, I would NEVER consider submitting more than one domain pointing to a particular site to any engine. One domain, one site per engine is my motto]

[Alan Perkins]

Anecdotally, I've found the Brits have tended to buy domain names with hyphens in, the Americans without. A few years back, you would often find a Brit had gone out and bought the most amazing .com domain name and not even considered the unhyphenated version. It would usually transpire that an American had bought that the previous year and failed to consider the hyphenated version.

These days we advise our clients to always buy both hyphenated and unhyphenated versions. Otherwise the effectiveness of offline marketing (particularly radio and word-of-mouth) can be massively diluted by people going to the wrong site, or no site at all. And of course, if you own both versions, you will point them both at the same Web site.

This is really one for the SEs to solve. My rule of thumb is that if somebody's got a perfectly good reason for doing something without considering search engines at all, then it can't be spam. It's up to search engines to cope with the way the Web is, not the other way round.