100% Organic - A Column From Search Engine Land Here’s a quick test for you. Don’t worry, it’s only one question. True or false: Today’s SEO techniques could be tomorrow’s search engine spam with one turn of the algo crank.

What do you think? Is what you do to optimize your site going to be considered search engine spam one day because of a change in the search engines’ magic formula?

Search engine spam takes many forms

If you answered “true,” you may need to seriously examine your SEO practices. Good, professional SEO that puts users first while keeping search engines in mind would never be considered spam by any stretch of a search engineer’s imagination. Search engine spam takes a concerted effort and is done in an attempt to misrepresent any given page of your website. It can take the form of showing one thing to the engines and something else to the typical website user, i.e., cloaking or hidden text. But that’s not the only thing that might be considered spam.

Search engine spam can be perfectly visible to the typical user as well. Keyword stuffing in all its forms—be it the copy, the title tags, within image alt attributes, or in anchor text—is search engine spam, as it’s only there to try to increase rankings. Which is why those “techniques” rarely work for very long.

You can’t OVER optimize anything

You may have heard some people talk about an “over-optimization” penalty. They say this can happen to a page that has too much optimization. Huh? How can a page be over-optimized? That’s like being “a little bit pregnant”! By its very nature the word “optimize” means “to make as effective, perfect, or useful as possible” (according to Dictionary.com).

Over-optimization isn’t optimization at all; it’s search engine spam, clear and simple. Just because your spam increased your rankings for awhile doesn’t mean that it wasn’t spam. And that’s what confuses people.

Search engine spam does work

It certainly is frustrating to review many top-ranking websites only to find them using all sorts of deceptive techniques that go unnoticed but are seemingly rewarded by the search engines. This in turn makes people assume that’s what you’re supposed to do on your website in order to get high rankings. They believe what they saw others doing must be a legitimate SEO technique. As far as I know, “everyone else is doing it” is not a legitimate defense in the courtroom, nor is it to the search engines when they decide to change their algorithm.

Jill Whalen, CEO and founder of High Rankings

(1 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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