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Many people who have websites are not totally up to date with what is considered to be search engine spamming. Having worked on search engine optimisation for a few clients, I have come across websites that are using spam techniques to help elevate search engine rankings. When I confronted clients about this, they honestly did not know they were using a form of spam nor did they realise the consequences if detected by the search engines.

So what is search engine spamming? A simple definition would be; deliberately designing website pages that offer poor and irrelevant content, and are used to trick search engines into ranking the content highly for inappropriate search results.

People tend to use spam as a way of attracting as many visitors to their website. When caught by the search engines, this will result in a major setback to business. Websites will be blacklisted from the search engines and chances are they will not appear in the index for a very long time.

Not sure if you are spamming? Below are a few common forms of spam techniques that you should avoid.

Doorway Pages ' Optimising a single webpage to perform exceptionally well in search engine ranks for a group of keyword phrases (keyword stuffing on the webpage). Once a user clicks on the link, they will be automatically redirected to a completely different website.

Invisible Text ' Using text that is not visible to the human eye (having the same colour text as the background colour). The invisible text will usually contain a large number of keywords (keyword stuffing).

Link Farms ' Joining community websites that provide large volumes of irrelevant links to your website.

Along with other forms of spam, these techniques should be avoided at all costs. If you are not sure whether your site uses some form of spam, then it would be best to contact a search engine optimisation specialist before it could result in your website being blacklisted.

Past clients who were using some form of spam and were not aware of it, had taken a big loss by having their website blacklisted in some search engines. The road to recovery can take very long and it is one that no one would like to follow. Be cautious!