If you think Spam® is just canned mystery meat, chances are you do not work in the Internet Marketing industry. For those of us who do, spam is a detrimental element on many websites. It has to be identified, located and removed to avoid the site being penalized by the search engines. And once you have been ‘pinged’ by Google and/or Yahoo, your site pretty much becomes permanently invisible. So it’s a really good idea to rout your site of spam.
So what is Spam? How to recognize it? And, if it is so ‘dangerous’ why would anyone use it in the first place?
SPAM – MORE THAN A NUISANCE
Spam is black hat SEO – practices that legitimate, read ‘honest’ Internet Marketing firms would never consider. “Legit’ firms use organic search initiatives to slowly build durable search engine friendly sites that will achieve decent rankings and maintain them. If you’ve chosen well, chances are you’ve selected an honest company sincerely interested in furthering your business interests on the web. Spam uses techniques designed for one purpose. To make the shoddy SEO firm money –the client’s; not to make their client more money.
How to recognize spammers? “If it looks too good to be true…” is one solid piece of advice. Maybe early on, when your online business was a startup, you selected your Internet Marketing firm based only on price and what they told you your site needed. You may have accepted content for site pages without question. Now you’ll need to check to see if your site content is original or ‘borrowed’ from an existing site. There are many sites that will ‘help’ you determine this. We prefer Google’s webmaster tools. If you do find that your content has a twin, do not waste time trying to determine who had it first and who plagiarized. Search engines will simply ping both of you. Change your content as soon as you can.
Another spammer trick is to abuse Social Media outlets. For example, if your site has a disproportionate number of Twitter responses compared to your Facebook and other accounts, click on the link and view them. Chances are you’ll see many coming from one source. Their identity will be false as well. Again using reverse image lookup tools you will be able to identify the ‘real ‘culprit. It’s likely to be someone with time on their hands and the need for a little pocket money, hired by a black hat firm to do a little ‘freelancing.’
MANY SPAM TECHNIQUES, ONE EASY SOLUTION
If I were to list all the tricks spammer’s use this article would be a novel. There is, of course, one easy way to avoid being scammed, I mean spammed. Hire a professional Internet Marketing firm in the first place. Active Web Group is a leading, full-service digital agency with the expertise to help you grow your business. We’ll address your concerns then tailor solutions that meet your business and budgetary expectations.
For more information on spam, call us at 1-800-978-3417 or Contact Active Web Group and let us help you!
