The major search engines (Google, MSN and Yahoo) all have one ultimate goal in mind; providing the best possible search experience for their users. They do this by consistently providing the most relevant results. Unfortunately, there are many who seek to undermine the search experience by tricking or “spamming” the search engines into featuring their site over others. Historically, there are a number of ways they have done this.

Cloaking: Using text with the same background color in order to create invisible or hidden text. A Phoenix criminal attorney was caught doing this – hiding the names of other prominent criminal lawyers on his site, so that his site would come up in searches for their names.

Duplicate Content: Doorway pages that have identical or nearly identical content. Many of the new patents that the search engines have applied for recently – deal with better ways to identify duplicate content on the web. Its important that each site or landing page provides a unique and helpful search experience. Earlier this year – a Scottsdale criminal lawyer was caught taking the word for word content from another criminal lawyer’s website – (even forgetting to take out the name of the other attorney). However, Google had seemingly penalized the site months before, as the site was absolutely invisible in the search results. Ironically, the site only started to rise after the duplicate content was taken off and new custom content was added.

Cybersquatting: This is where someone uses a domain that closely resembles another popular domain – whose only purpose is to get traffic from someone that makes a typo.

Keyword Stuffing: Overuse of keywords or tiny text to “enhance” your ranking is a big no no. First and foremost, content should be used to advance the search experience and not used to manipulate search results.

Using Deceptive Linking Practice: Users to a site should be able to navigate with ease and should never be tricked into going someplace that they dont intend to go. Clicking on a link that mysteriously takes you to an online gammbling site would be an example.

Today, the search engines are adept at picking out these methods and dealing with offenders through their ranking algorithm. However, they still allow users to report suspected violations of their webmaster’s guidelines. To report a suspected violation in Google click here. Anyone suspected of violating MSN should email; reportspam@inktomi.com