SEO Warrior

Summary

All search engines regularly post and update their webmaster guidelines. Google’s webmaster guidelines talk about “illicit practices” and possible penalties (http://bit.ly/PFen):

Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the “Quality Guidelines,” which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalized. If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.

Basically, if you break the rules and use any sneaky tactics, your site will eventually be penalized. Often, it does not take more than a few days before you are caught. Even if search engines cannot detect a particular deception through their underlying algorithms, your site (or sites) is still likely to be caught, thanks to web users reporting spam results. All major search engines provide easy ways for the public or (often angry) webmasters to report search engine spam. Here are links to forms for reporting SERP spam:

Yahoo!

http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_reportsearchspam

Google

http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

Bing

http://support.msn.com/feedbacksearch.aspx

As we discussed in this chapter, understanding search engine spam is important. It is a road map of all the things you should avoid. Although certain black ...