The desire to rank high in search engine returns and relevancy rankings has lead to what is called "spamming ". It is a term for a host of techniques that attempt to outsmart the bots and spiders that perform the relevancy rankings for the search engines.
Search engines use any number of techniques to help determine how relevant a page is to certain keywords and search terms. These techniques include selecting keywords from Meta tags or counting the number of times a particular search term appears on a particular page (the higher the number of occurrences of the word, the more relevancy the page is afforded when that keyword is entered).
Website administrators then manipulate the HTML on their indexed pages in order to come up more often in users' keyword searches and achieve a higher relevancy ranking when the search engine finds a match. The ways of doing this include:
WORD STUFFING - Filling Meta tags with keywords that do not relate to the site's actual content in order to be matched with a search return more often.
METAJACKING - Copying the Meta tag of another site that receives high search engine ranking to use in another site's code.
SPAMDEXING - Adding the same keyword over and over to a page by including it in comment tags.
FONTMATCHING - Adding keywords, often the same word over and over, with the text set to the exact color of your background, making the type invisible to the viewer, yet indexable.
KEYWORD GATEWAYS - Using a Meta refresh tag (so fast that it can't be seen) to lead a viewer away from a dummy page that was actually indexed by the search engine to another page.
Spamming is becoming more prevalent and has created a big problem for search engine administrators who want to provide the best service possible for Internet users.
Infoseek was one of the first major search engines to seriously crack down on unethical search submission techniques. Any site that submits a page to Infoseek that uses keywords unrelated to the page content will be penalized in its ranking or removed from the index.
Infoseek recently instituted a new feature called clustering, which clusters all pages submitted from the same domain and indexes them together. This solves the problem of companies trying to push a competitor's page rankings down to the second or third (or more) page of search returns by indexing a large number of pages from the same site with the same keywords.
Other search engines, notably Excite, do not use Meta tags to index sites, in attempt to foil spammers, but ignoring meta tag content does not solve other problems such as keyword repetition.
HotBot is following Infoseek's lead. HotBot will penalize sites that use a particular keyword "implausibly frequently."
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