In this article I will be talking about spam and why not to be a spammer. Spam started off as a food stuff made by Hormel back in 1937 (there is even a spam museum). The term spam for the web industry was originated back in the early 70s after the Monty Python “Spam” sketch, in which a couple eating at a restaurant looking at a menu made up of near enough all spam. In the 90s the term spam was introduced to refer to unwanted or unrelated messages left on USENET newsgroups, the term has since stuck. Now people throughout the world know what spam is and associate it with Junk Emails, Web Sites and of course the food.

Spam is used in the web industry to help drive users to websites or advert sites; it is viewed as an unethical technique performed by businesses.

More often than not people refer to their junk email as spam, spammers use many techniques to send email to hundreds if not thousands of people. One of which is when users think a company is quite legitimate and feel the need to leave their email address for maybe future updates etc, alot of companies keep client details on file for years, time to time these so called legitimate companies may feel the need to make a quick bit of cash and will happily sell on the email list they have gathered over the years, this I feel is a big breach of trust, how could you trust the company again (if you found out who gave your address away). Some spammers also use email generaters, where emails will be generated from a dictionary of words, names and other information. This is why you may see several email addresses that are a very close match to yours.

Spam does not only refer to junk emails it can also refer to websites, for example you search for something using a search engine, and you click one of the results hoping to see the information you have been looking for, but you are confronted with a page full of listings to other websites that actually have the data, these kinds of pages are used to generate revenue for the owner and are generally a pain for the user.

Spam also refers to some techniques used in the SEO industry to get client websites to the top of the search engines, these practices include hiding text which refer to the terms searched for by the user when the page itself has nothing to do with the search term.

Spamming can get businesses a bad reputation and although they may occasionally get high search rankings they can also cause website rankings to drop down exponentially or even be dropped out of the search engines all together. This is one of the main reasons why you should not be a spammer. Websites being dropped out of search engines is not unheard of, infact it is common practice for search engines to drop websites which they feel break their terms of service.

So to conclude, I would always suggest to anyone NOT to be a spammer, as this could definitly drive away customers and bring a bad reputation to your company, don’t forget word of mouth is normally more powerful than any sort of advertising available. And most of all it is Unethical.

As a search engine uses the linguistics of the natural language as part of their ranking algorithms, it may be tempting to have a high concentration of keywords based on a single page. In the early days of search engines this was a common technique used in SEO to get pages ranked highly in the search engine result pages (SERP’s). However from a user’s point of view this technique made the content of the given page very uninformative as it was filled with poor content with the keyword repeated over and over again. To combat this, the search engines began to adjust the algorithm to look at the content and the keywords from a user’s point of view, to see if there was valuable content within the page and not just repetition of keywords.

This is when the word “web spamming” was born. The search engines wanted, and still do want to value a page on its content, but still have to take into account the linguistics of the natural language to identify what the page is about. Therefore, they created a set of rules to identify whether a site has too high a concentration of Keywords for the content to be of any use to the search engine. This as you might have guessed is highly complex and varies from search engine to search engine. Below is a good example of spam; and you will notice I have used an image to show you this, as not to spam my blog, is as follows:

This is a classic example of Spam in its rawest form. Unethical techniques within SEO have since learned to spread the keyword repetition out within the context of the page. Due to this, search engines have responded to this and that is why a high concentration of key words within the content of your page can have an adverse effect on your ranking.