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Spam

The word spam in its most general terms is used to describe any activity undertaken by web marketeers and web masters that aims to manipulate users as well as providers of the world wide web in a deceptive, irritating, overbearing and unsolicited manner in order to profit. As there are three main branches of web promotion so are there three main areas of spam:

E-mail spam

Most web users find unsolicited commercial email annoying and time consuming; others have lost money to bogus offers that arrived in their email in-box. Typically, an email spammer buys a list of email addresses from a list broker, who compiles it by "harvesting" addresses from the internet. The marketer then uses special software that can send hundreds of thousands, even millions of email messages to the addresses at the click of a mouse.

According to the Mail Abuse Prevention System, a non profit organisation dedicated to defend the internet's email system from abuse by spammers, this is their definition of email spam:

An electronic message is "spam" IF: (1) the recipient's personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients; AND (2) the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent; AND (3) the transmission and reception of the message appears to the recipient to give a disproportionate benefit to the sender.

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Search engine spam

This form of web site marketing abuse is simply defined as any attempt to deceive a search engine's relevancy algorithm.

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. In other words any meaningless text designed to increase keyword density including tiny text, invisible text, noframes text, noscript text, alt text.

Meta spam
Data that mis-describes a resource or describes a resource incoherently in order to manipulate a search engine's relevancy calculations. Generally, anything within the <head> section of an html document, or anything within the <body> section that describes another resource, can be subverted to deliver meta spam.

Redirects
Where a redirect is used to move a human quickly from a page that has been designed for a search engine to see to a page designed for a human to see, then the whole page designed for the search engine to see is spam. To increase this effect spammers frequently register numerous domains each displaying a web page redirecting the visitor to the destination web site.

Cloaking
The identification of search engine robots by IP name or address and the delivery of unique content to those robots. Using this definition, all uses of IP Cloaking are spam. This is because the unique content is designed only for the search engine robot to see, not for humans and therfore must have been done only to influence search engine relevancy.

With the exception of cloaking (the name alone gives the game away) all of the above methods have originally been invented for purposes other than spamming. To detect spam is to simply determine if any of these techniques would have been used on the web site if search engines did not exist. It is also worth to note at this point that search engines have become very sophisticated in detecting spamming methods and any web site deemed to be spamming risks to be penalised by being excluded from their indices.

Link spam
Here is a general rule of thumb to determine whether link spam has taken place - if the link is not designed to be followed by humans, or the page it is on is not designed to be read by humans, then it is spam.

The most common method of link spamming are link farms, a network of pages on one or more Web sites, heavily cross-linked with each other, with the sole intention of improving the search engine ranking of those pages and sites.

Another less usefull way is continuous mass submissions to Free For All (FFA) link pages. FFA pages are of little or no use in generating traffic as any link placed there is constantly rotated and never stays long enough to have any impact. To continuously submit a link to an FFA page is therefore largely done to improve link popularity and since it would not be deemed as a relevant link by search engines has very little effect.