Spamdexing

What is Spamdexing?

Spamdexing, also known as webspam and black-hat SEO, is a set of practices aimed at manipulating search engine results and thus violating Google’s webmaster guidelines. Spamdexing provides no value for searchers, which makes search engines actively fight webspam.

Google’s anti-spamdexing solution is called SpamBrain. It helps them to keep more than 99% of searches spam-free.

Spamdexing methods

Smapdexing methods can be divided into content spam and link spam.

Content spam includes:

• Automatically generated content (including article spinning)
• Thin content
• Cloaking
• Hidden text
• Doorway pages
• Scraped content
• Keyword stuffing (irrelevant keywords)

Link spamdexing methods are:

• Private blog networks (PBNs)
• Paid links
• Excessive guest blogging and link exchange
• Buying expired domains
• User-generated links (forums, comments, etc.)
• Website hacking/link injection

Should you use spamdexing?

The short answer is “NO.”

Here at Ahrefs, we disapprove of any black-hat SEO techniques.

However, it’s true that some spamdexing methods still work these days, especially in specific industries such as loans, gambling, adult, etc.

Black-hat SEO professionals are aware of the risks and know they can get a penalty from Google, and their websites will be deindexed. They’ll just migrate to a new domain - it’s part of their game.

However, if you’re serious about your website and want it to get steady organic search traffic in the long term, you should stay away from spamdexing.