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The search engine blekko is small as compared to the technology giants yet it has raised $24 million for the past three years in the hope of developing a useful search engine that will be beneficial for the information seekers.
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The menace of spam continues to grow by the day. Every year billions of bogus e-mails are sent causing immense loss to both consumers and Internet service providers. The latest and most sophisticated search engineblekko returns spam free results. • The cost of sending sham e-mails is very less. Almost all the cost is borne by the company providing the net service or the end users. This encourages the spammers to continue with the menace. • Since spam entails a low operating cost, spammers are not wary of shooting arrows in the dark. They do so with the hope that even few gullible victims trapped can give them a high return on investment. • In the subsequent sections, we shall deal in detail with spam, spammers, and spamdexing. We shall also see the immense harm they can cause and how a judicious choice of search engine can provide us effective protection from the menace of spam.
What is Spamdexing? • Spamdexing, also known as search engine spam or search engine poisoning, refers to deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. • Indexes are built by automated software programs called robots or crawlers, also known as ants or spiders. Crawlers visit a website and thoroughly scrutinize their contents. • They check its Meta tags, read what is written there or the quality of information it dispenses, the number of websites that link to it, and the consumer traffic it attracts. • Armed with all this information, the crawler returns to the central depository, where the data is indexed.
The crawler at certain frequency returns to the site to check for any addition or deletion of information. • When people make use of any Internet search engine to find any specific information on the Internet, they are in fact searching through this index that the search engine has created. • As such, these indexes are the real target of unscrupulous webmasters and spammers. They have a variety of tools to manipulate the relevance of the resources indexed by the search engines. • This unethical practice of manipulating indexes to secure a higher ranking in the results displayed by search engine is referred to as Black Hat Search Engine Optimization (SEO) technique. Some of the common Black Hat SEO practices are:
Stuffing of Keywords • One of the tricks used by these tricksters is called keyword stuffing or simply overstuffing. • Tricksters stuff their webpage with dozen or maybe hundreds of keywords, so that they are easily picked up by search engines. Some even make use of text matching the page’s background to make them invisible to users. • This is done with the express purpose of fooling both the users and the search engine. For example, a shoddy organization selling pornographic books may place keyword appropriate for a reputable book seller. • This can also be useful to make a page appear to be relevant for a search engine crawler. Modern and sophisticated search engine like Blekko has the analyzing ability to determine whether the particular website has resorted to keyword stuffing.
Page Stuffing or Page Hijacking • This is another popular method used by unethical webmasters to rob people of a fair search engine experience. Website owners or website developers create a genuine site that scores a high ranking on Search Engine Return Pages (SERP’s). • They then make an exact copy of it to ensure that both pages make it to the top. It is an unscrupulous means of driving out competition by deliberately thwarting the attempts of other websites from scoring high on SERP.
Hidden or Invisible Text • Unrelated hidden text is used by unprofessional webmasters to eliminate competition and direct traffic to their website. They use invisible text that matches the background color of the website. • Tiny font sizes are used, which is then hidden within HTML code to trick search engine spiders. Some crawlers are programmed to identify and ignore text that matches the webpage’s background color.
Spam Links • Link Farming or link selling is a popular Black Hat SEO technique. Unprofessional and unethical webmasters indulge in buying and selling of links to increase the relevancy of their websites. • Majority of the search engines place high importance on the number of links that a website has to determine its relevancy. Miscreants buy links from other sites to boost the rank of their sites. • Web pages are interlinked to one another to increase each other’s ranking in the process creating a highly frustrating search experience for end users. • Webmasters also have a collection of web pages, whose sole purpose is to interlink with one another to boost a page’s rank.
Conclusion • Most internet search engines penalize websites that indulge in unethical and unprofessional tactics to increase their website ranking. This, unfortunately, has not proved to be an effective deterrent. • Blekko is a hybrid search engine that uses a judicious mix of algorithm and human expertise to exclude websites that make use of, or are suspected of resorting to spamming or other unscrupulous means to increase their website ranking.
