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.

Related posts:

1. Death of the High Street Long live the Internet
2. Don’t be a spammer
3. Keyword Density
4. SEO and the future of your company
5. Long Tail Search Engine Optimisation