Great SEW article [Archive] - SEO Best Practices Search Engine Forums

Advisor

05-11-2001, 12:59/12:59PM

For anyone who has a paid subscription to Search Engine Watch (and if you don't...shame on you!), check out .Danny's latest on the whole spam issue (http://searchenginewatch.com/subscribers/articles/0111-standards.html)

He discusses Alan's white paper, as well as Bruce Clay's code of ethics, and many other spam groups and discussions that have cropped up lately.

A great read, as usual!

Jill

Alan Perkins

05-11-2001, 14:18/02:18PM

That is indeed a good article. I spoke to Danny briefly about it before he published, but it was in no way an interview and he did not have the benefit of the "going over" we gave the White Paper on this forum. So I'm impressed at what he took away from the White Paper.

I like the term "Natural SEO" but feel that where Danny says this ...

A bit further to the right of the pure naturalist, you might find someone else who considers themselves a naturalist. However, this person might think it is perfectly fine to make light changes to an existing page and to use style sheets so that human visitors get a nicely designed version while crawlers tend to see a more ordinary textual experience.

Around the middle of the spectrum, you might have someone who finds it perfectly acceptable to create what are sometimes called "informational pages," a term coined by search engine marketers Detlev Johnson, Marshall Simmonds and Shari Thurow.

... I would consider all of those techniques to be "Natural SEO", with the caveat that nothing is done purely for crawlers, everything is done for the benefit of at least some of the search engine's users. Also, to answer Danny's question here (as I will on the FAQ (http://www.ebrandmanagement.com/whitepapers/spam-classification/faq.htm) later):

would someone be spamming if they were to make use of font tags and an H1 tag to highlight the headline of their body copy? This is often done, because some search engines may give a slight boost to H1 copy.

The answer is "No" if it was a heading anyway (like on your HighRankings site, Jill), "Yes" if it wasn't a heading but has been wrapped in a <H1> tag to give it a boost.

I'll be talking to Danny about his "confusion" around cloaking. One of the aims of the White Paper is to isolate cloaking as the only "technology" guaranteed to deliver Search Engine Spam (note: that's Search Engine Spam, nothing to do with what the user sees). I'm surprised that Danny found this the most confusing area. Search Engine Spammers like confusion around cloaking so they can "mingle with the crowd".

It'll be interesting to see how this all pans out. I still maintain that a "big book of rules" is not the answer to clearing up spam. Good education is part of the answer. People need to understand why search engines have a problem with anything done purely for their "benefit". S'why I'm here :)

ihelpyou

05-11-2001, 20:51/08:51PM

Yes. There does seem to be big confusion about cloaking. The spin put out by the cloaking causes all of this confusion.

To me, especially after reading the white paper, there is NO confusion at all. Simply stated, anything you do for the search engine's benefit ONLY is spam. There is absolutely no benefit to the user derived from cloaking. All is for the search engine.

Alan Perkins

06-11-2001, 04:10/04:10AM

"anything you do for the search engine's benefit ONLY is spam" ... is true if you are talking about things that are done within the <BODY> tags.

The problem I had with the White Paper was I had to go a level higher to talk about spam in the <HEAD> section and other forms of meta-spam.

Your definition of spam is close to mine of "Content Spam":

Data within a part of a Web resource designed for humans (e.g. the <BODY> of a HTML document) where that data is designed only for search engines to see

Of course, when cloaking you are cloaking both the <HEAD> and <BODY> sections, so by definition it is Content Spam...