Search engine optimization takes a long time before you see results. To speed things up, some website owners and SEO marketers use black hat SEO techniques to inflate search engine rankings.
SEO spam is a set of black hat techniques used by hackers and spammers to improve organic rankings in a short period of time.
The most common types of SEO spam are:
If Google detects policy-violating practices in your website, it can apply automatic or manual search engine penalties.
Automatic algorithmic penalties demote your site in the organic search results, resulting in a sudden decrease in rankings, while manual penalties given by human reviewers can remove your entire domain from the SERP.
If you feel your site is penalized, check for huge ranking drops across your website or on specific pages. A Google penalty can be applied site-wide or on some pages. You can also review the Manual Actions and Security Issues sections inside Google Search Console. If there is anything fishy on your website, you will receive a notification here. If there is a green tick, then no penalties are applied.
The best ways to fix SEO spam on your website are by identifying the issue that is violating Google’s spam policies and taking actions to minimize the cause. You also need to wait for Google systems to make sure your website no longer violates the spam policies for web search results or file a reconsideration request (if the penalty is severe).
SEO or search engine optimization spam is a set of practices where spammers manipulate the search engine result pages by targeting pages of a highly ranking website. They can inject codes, content, links, and CTAs to divert users to their website or products.
Some webmasters also resort to SEO spam to rank their website faster in the search results. Search engine optimization spam is dangerous because it can ruin your business reputation and make you lose all your hard-earned rankings.
Yes, spamdexing and SEO spam are the same.
Spamdexing is the process of manipulating search engine indexes. It consists of content and link spam techniques and is carried by black hat SEO professionals in the same way as SEO spam.
Wouldn’t you be surprised if Google returned a page like this with gibberish content? But you never face such issues while searching on Google because it constantly identifies and removes pages like the one below from its search index.
Search engine spam is mostly carried out for industries like loans, crypto, gambling, adult, and other high-stakes industries. However, Google restricts spamdexing using modern AI-based spam prevention systems known as the Spambrain. It accurately finds and restricts more than 400 million spammy pages every day.
The negative effects of spam on SEO are that your website might lose all or a portion of its search engine rankings. There are algorithmic and manual Google penalties applied by Google Search that can cause big ranking drops and massive harm to your brand’s reputation.
Here are the different forms of SEO spam that are picked up by search engine spam filters:
Cloaking happens when users see a different version of your content than search engine crawlers. It is a high-risk black hat technique that damages search performance and user trust.
Websites that engage in web spam, like cloaking, use two main ways to deceive visitors. They identify visitors using the user-agent or IP address filtering. If the visitor is a human, the URL either redirects to a phishing page or JavaScript is loaded with illicit content. If the visitor is a bot, an optimized and safe version of the webpage with people-first content is shown to rank high in search.
Cloaking can be of different types, like:
Doorway pages are low-quality pages that funnel users toward the same destination to maximize a site’s “search footprint.”
These pages rank for generic terms and are designed solely for search engines, leading users to repetitive or nearly identical pages across the same site or multiple spam sites.
Here is an example where two sites with identical content rank for the same query:
Google considers doorway pages a form of webspam because they are made to capture more search traffic, send affiliate traffic elsewhere, or manipulate rankings rather than improve the user experience.
Hidden or invisible text refers to hiding keywords or phrases on a web page that can be seen by search engine bots but are not visible to users.
Similar to hidden text, hidden links mean adding hyperlinks in a page that remains invisible to the users but is visible to the search engines.
Hiding text or links to improve SEO rankings was once a widely used black hat tactic. Nowadays, search engines can easily detect such manipulative practices to keep their search index reliable and safe.
Keyword stuffing refers to the unnatural forcing of keywords on a webpage to artificially earn higher organic rankings. It looks like this:
As you can see from the image above, the page is optimized for the keyword ‘fire pit tables’. Keyword stuffing used to be a go-to black hat SEO technique for ranking manipulation.
However, Google already has stricter algorithms in place that automatically detect and remove such spam pages from search results. Now, Google prefers people-first content that is EEAT-friendly.
Stuffing your page with keywords violates Google’s spam policies. It could lead to a loss in rankings or even a manual action penalty.
Backlink spam is the commonest type of SEO spam that is used by black hat marketers to quickly raise the domain authority of a website so that it begins to rank faster.
Link spam is the practice of creating or giving unnatural backlinks to and from websites for the purpose of manipulating the search index.
For example, a business can buy sponsored guest posts with dofollow links, which is a violation of Google’s spam policies since all sponsored content should have the sponsored tag in it. Receiving large-scale guest post links in the author bio is also a form of link spam.
The different types of link spam are:
Automated traffic is an SEO spam where traffic to a website is non-human and generated using bots. Fake user visits are used to artificially inflate page views, clicks, or engagement metrics, misleading analytics, and potentially harming website performance.
You should avoid using automatic traffic generator tools to artificially raise your website traffic because if Google catches you doing it, it can count it as search engine spam and penalize your website by demoting your organic rankings.
What happens when you want to rank on Google for your target keywords, but your own website authority is not that high? A good option is to publish your content on other highly authoritative domains to earn higher rankings quickly. That’s parasite SEO, where you use another website’s reputation to your advantage.
Parasite SEO is the practice of publishing content on a third-party host site because it has established ranking signals. One such website that got penalized by Google for hosting parasite content is Outlook India. It ranked for almost any keyword in 2023.
However, the Helpful Content Update launched by Google in September 2023 wiped out all the parasite SEO related traffic from the website.
What most black hat SEO marketers do is publish unoriginal and low-quality content on reputable domains only for the sake of rankings.
Hence, if you have a high-authority website and you allow user-generated content, you need to be very careful regarding the kind of content you allow to be published on your domain to avoid site reputation abuse.
When you publish lots of content on your website simply for the purpose of rankings and not helping users, that’s scaled content abuse.
With the rise of generative AI content tools, it has become pretty easy for websites to produce content. However, creating large amounts of unoriginal and unedited content that provides little to no value to users is an issue.
Google’s search quality raters give the lowest rating to pages with copied, paraphrased, AI- generated, embedded, or reposted content that adds little originality or value, even when the original source is credited.
You receive a manual penalty notification in Google Search Console for scaled content abuse.
User-generated spam is spammy content created through open comment forms, sign-up systems, forums, or hosting platforms. Spammers generate low-value pages, links, redirects, phishing pages, or automated submissions to manipulate search engines or abuse a service.
Here are a couple of examples of user-generated spam where the spammers post deceiving content and links to get links to their sites using exact match anchors.
To prevent it, websites should publish a clear abuse policy, identify spam patterns such as unusual form completion times, repeated IP address activity, suspicious user agents, and spammy keywords.
There are also reputation systems, manual moderation, CAPTCHA verification tools, blocklists, nofollow or ugc link attributes, and monitoring tools like server logs or Safe Browsing checks to detect and stop abusive or automated behavior.
The “Japanese keyword hack” is a lesser-known SEO spam attack where hackers inject thousands of fake pages, filled with Japanese or Chinese characters, into a website. These additional cloaked pages are hidden from the users while Google still indexes them.
This is how Japanese SEO spam looks in Google search results:
To detect the Japanese keyword hack, you should look at the Search Console to see if there are any unexpected indexed URLs with strange query parameters or spammy snippets.
Even after the malicious files are removed, Google can continue showing those pages until the site returns proper 404/410 responses and Google recrawls the URLs, which can take weeks or months.
You can fix the Japanese keyword hack error by removing injected code, updating CMS/plugins/passwords, and requesting reindexing in Google Search Console.
SEO spam happens in two main ways: to boost your own rankings or to hurt a competitor’s rankings. Here are the two ways of SEO spam:
1- Self-Inflicted SEO Spam: When a website owner deliberately uses black hat SEO techniques to trick search algorithms, it is known as self-inflicted SEO spam. Some of the top spammy-SEO practices deliberately used for self-inflicting web spam are:
You have direct control over self SEO spam. Also, the negative aftereffects of self SEO spam can be minimized once you stop using spammy tactics and create useful content for the readers.
2- Offensive SEO Spam (Negative SEO): When your competitors leverage aggressive spam SEO techniques to lower your SEO rankings, it is considered negative or offensive SEO spam.
Some of the top tactics for negative SEO spam are:
You don’t have direct control over offensive spam, and you need to constantly monitor your site’s CMS, content, and backlinks to safeguard it from negative SEO attacks.
WordPress websites are most affected by SEO spam attacks because most website owners rely on third-party themes with abandoned or unsupported security plugins, which are prone to vulnerabilities.
You can scan your site with a malware scanner like Wordfence Security to identify any traces of search engine optimization spam.
Also, get rid of unused plugins, review your Google Search Console account for malware warnings, and regularly update your theme/plugins to keep your website safe from SEO spam.
If your site is ranked lower or completely wiped out from search results, you have been affected by SEO spam. There are two ways to check search engine optimization spam, which are manual and automatic.
As the name suggests, manual ways refer to identifying SEO spam by manually auditing your website’s content and domain link profile.
Here are the top ways to check for SEO spam manually:
You can also detect SEO spam automatically using different software and tools. A combination of both manual and automatic methods to identify search engine optimization spam is the best approach to follow.
Here are the proven ways to look for SEO spam using automatic tools:
Spam Score is an SEO risk metric provided by tools like Moz Pro that estimates how likely a website is to be flagged as spam by search engines based on 27 different signals. These signals are:
To check the spam score of your website, enter your domain into Moz Link Explorer and review the Spam Score percentage:
Don’t become a victim of a negative SEO attack and let anyone hamper your website’s credibility. Follow these proven ways to prevent SEO spam:
Yes, SEO spam is part of black hat SEO as it is done to increase rankings through spam methods instead of genuine SEO work. People use these tactics to push fake pages, create spam backlinks, inject keywords, or redirect visitors to unrelated websites just to gain traffic from search engines.
Back in 2010, web spam was very high. Article submission websites like Ezine articles, Squidoo lenses, and Articlesbase used to rank on Google for different search queries on almost any topic.
The quality of the articles on these and other similar websites was of low-quality. Most of the content on these article sites contained exact match anchors. These came to be known as ‘content farms.’ To combat thin-content spam, Google launched the Panda update in 2011.
Panda reduced the rankings of low-quality and spam-heavy websites. Before Panda, many websites, like the Articlesbase.com, published massive amounts of low-value content just to rank for keywords, which hurt search quality and user experience. The Panda algorithm change penalized sites with poor-quality content and rewarded websites with original, useful, and trustworthy information.
In less than a year after the Panda update, Google launched the Penguin update in April 2012 to combat manipulative link-building practices.
The Penguin algorithm penalized sites for:
The Penguin algorithm change targeted grey hat SEM techniques that impacted 3.1% of search queries in English. It targeted unnatural backlink patterns, spammy link profiles, and penalizing websites using black-hat manipulative link schemes.
Penguin webspam algorithm rewarded websites with naturally earned editorial backlinks, while penalized sites that relied on building links from poor-quality sources, like link farms, sponsored dofollow posts, and low-quality comment spam.
Over time, Google released several Penguin updates, with Penguin 4.0 in 2016 becoming part of Google’s core algorithm and operating in real time.
No, SEO spam score checkers are not accurate. These are just estimates based on certain data, like your backlink history, and sites with a high spam score might still rank exceptionally high on Google.
You shouldn’t worry about spam scores that much and instead focus on publishing high-quality content on your website. Top-notch content naturally acquires relevant inbound links, which is hard to beat, and it improves the authority of your domain.
Also, Google does not count spam scores as these are third-party metrics. Most search engines have their own algorithms and search processes to identify and combat web spam.
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