Bing about web spam - Is your website considered spam?

The official Bing blog recently had a post about web spam. According to Bing's definition, web spam is "unwanted web content that uses overtly manipulative techniques in an effort to fraudulently attain undeservingly high ranking in search engines."

Why is web spam a problem?

Search engines want to return relevant websites on their result pages. If a web spam page is listed in the search results, it will lead the search engine user to a web page that is not related to the query.

How does Bing classify web spam?

Bing classifies spam based on two types of signals: page-level and link-level:

Page-level spam is comprised of shady search engine optimization techniques that are used on-page. On-page spamming techniques include hidden text, keyword stuffing, doorway pages and cloaking.

Link-level spam uses fraudulent linking strategies to improve the rankings of a website in the search engines. For example, this can be done by joining automated link exchange networks or by setting up many domains with automatically generated pages for the sole purpose of linking to each other.

For a page to be labeled as web spam by Bing, at least one of these techniques must be in use.

Does Bing penalize web pages with web spam?

The Bing engineers actively work to detect web spam. When thy find a website that uses spammy optimization techniques, they will penalize that website:

"We penalize those sites with actions commensurate with the egregiousness of their offenses, ranging from rank neutralization (intentionally lowering their organic page rank) to permanent expulsion from the index."

What does this mean for your website?

Although this blog post was written by Bing engineers, it is very likely that Google uses similar (if not more strict) methods to find web spam. If you don't want to risk the position of your website in the search results, you should only use ethical search engine optimization methods.

If you use spammy SEO methods, you might get high rankings on search engines quickly. Unfortunately, search engines usually detect all spamming methods sooner or later and they will completely remove your website from the search results as soon as they find out that you use these methods:

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