Do Search Engine Think Your Website Spam?

How search engines try to detect spammy pages?

The are so many potential spam pages on the Internet that search engines cannot identify all spam pages manually.

To identify potential spam pages, search engines might manually label some web pages as spam and then take information from that pages to find other spam pages.

For example, a web page that uses keyword stuffing has more keywords than a legitimate page. By training the spam detection algorithm with a few web pages that use keyword stuffing, other web pages that use keyword stuffing can be detected automatically.

In other words, a spam detection algorithm labels web pages as spam or not spam by looking at decisions made by humans. According to the patent application, the algorithm might look at the following factors:

* The number of inbound links coming from labeled spam pages * The top level domain of the site * The quality of phrases in the document and density of keywords (spammy terms) * The count of the most frequent term * The count of the number of unique terms * The total number of terms and the number of words in the path * The number of words in the title * The rank of the domain and the average number of words * The number of hits within a domain * The number of users of a domain * The number of hits on a URL and the number of users of a URL * The date the URL was crawled, the last date page changed * Many many other factors

If your website uses similar elements as the spammy web page then it's likely that your website will be classified as spam. The usual impact of a website being labeled as spam is that the site might be pushed down in search results, or removed completely.