What Exactly Is Spam?

As much as we all would like the search engines to give us clear guidelines on what does and does not constitute spam, we have to accept that it is an unrealistic expectation. Whenever a search engine presents a clear-cut spam guideline, unethical search engine marketers try to implement exceptions to the guideline. Then the search engines must update the guideline to include the new exceptions to the guideline, and so on, and so on. It's a never-ending process. Thus, the search engines present general rather than specific guidelines as to what constitutes spam.

Search engine spam is more about how and to what extent a marketing technique is used rather than if a technique is used. Thus, the search engine Spam Police do not automatically penalize a site for using a design technique if that design technique is used in an appropriate manner. For example, a site that uses invisible DHTML layers for drop-down menus , such as the Position Technologies site (see Figures 5.1 and 5.2), are not penalized because the invisible layers serve a navigation purpose. However, if a design or writing technique is used to deliberately trick a search engine into offering inappropriate, irrelevant, redundant, or poor-quality search results, a site can be penalized for spamming .

Figure 5.1. Position Technologies uses DHTML layers as part of its navigation scheme. The menus are not visible to site visitors at first.

Figure 5.2. When a visitor places his or her cursor over the top navigation or the side navigation, the menus appear. Because the menus are meant to be seen by the site's visitors, the invisible DHTML layer is not considered spam.

To determine whether a search engine marketing strategy is spam, ask yourself the following questions:

• Does your web site's actual content benefit your target audience and end users?

• Would you perform a search engine marketing strategy if the search engines did not exist?

• Are you building pages primarily for search engine positioning?

If you answered "yes" to the first and second questions and "no" to the third question, then in all likelihood , the search engine Spam Police will not consider the use of your design or writing strategies to be spam.