Toxins & Search Engine Spam Penalties

Anyone entering the realm of search engine optimization is likely to encounter some questionable (aka “black hat”) tactics, or Toxins. These are shortcuts, or tricks, that may have been sufficient to guarantee a high ranking back in the day when the engines’ methods were much less sophisticated. 

We recommend staying far away from these tactics, because employing them could result in a penalty or ban. Rest assured, It’s hard to accidentally spam a search engine, and the engines look at a variety of signals before deciding if someone deserves a harsh penalty.

Cloaking

Showing search engine crawlers something different than what you present to users is called “cloaking,” and it can potentially be used to trick users into visiting irrelevant or harmful pages.

Unlike some of the other Toxins, cloaking is not something that can happen by accident — it’s a deliberate attempt to manipulate search results, and if you’re caught doing it, you can expect a very heavy penalty.

What about JavaScript issues? “Cloaking is specifically against Google guidelines, but those guidelines are murky at the moment because of JavaScript. One server side rendering (SSR) solution offers it only dynamically in concert with spider spotting. When you handle a request from Googlebot, you can opt to do SSR whereas all other requests are handled normally, delivering scripts for rendering in the browser. That, technically speaking, is cloaking, but Google looks the other way because they’re aware of the intent.

As long as your intent is not suspicious, you can do this and expect to not get banned. It’s when you reserve some content for spiders that you don’t display to users that things start to cross the line.

Stuffing

You might assume that the more times a keyword shows up on a page, the more relevant search engines will consider the page to be to the query. Nope. Inserting keywords more often than is natural or useful to users is called “keyword stuffing.” It’s one of the oldest spam tactics out there and it can still get you penalized.

Don’t repeat keywords over and over again in your headings, copy, footers — anywhere — to try to improve your rankings. There is no magic formula for keyword frequency, and keyword density is a myth. 

Instead, focus on addressing the user’s intent. Whether that results in a keyword occurring only a couple of times or over a dozen times is far less important than the quality of your content and the value it provides to your audience.

Piracy

Ripping off someone else’s intellectual property — an article, song, graphic, photo, video, etc. — and passing it off as your own is illegal. That’s not the only reason why it’s bad for SEO, though: users generally want the original source of the content, and search engines want to provide it for them.

Google’s 2012 “Pirate” update took aim at sites infringing on copyright law. Sites are subject to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) takedown requests. Plagiarizing or hosting plagiarized or illegal content can get you delisted from search results. Check your Google Search Console notifications if you suspect that a DMCA takedown request has been filed against you.

Schemes

Seeking backlinks is an essential aspect of SEO, but the rules change when money is involved. Paying for links that pass link equity violates both Google and Bing’s guidelines, and doing so can have dire consequences for your organic visibility.

You could be penalized or banned by Google, and neither is a good situation. Depending upon how bad the problem is, it can take anywhere from a few months to a few years to get back to where you were.

To be clear, you can pay to have a backlink placed on another entity’s website (as would be the case with ads), but those links cannot pass link equity. Paid links should be indicated with either a rel=“nofollow” or rel=“sponsored” link attribute.

Schemes aren’t just limited to buying links, either: large-scale guest posting services with keyword-laden anchors, link exchanges, blog spamming and other illicit practices may also result in penalties from search engines.

Don’t believe programs that tell you their paid links are undetectable. 

Hiding

Site owners who stuff keywords into their pages may also try to obscure those attempts by hiding the text. Whether it’s by matching the font color to the background, positioning text off screen, decreasing font size to zero or any other method of concealment, hiding text is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can result in a penalty.

Links may also be styled in a way to make them invisible to users, which some site owners might do to visually obscure paid links while attempting to pass link equity. Whatever reason you may have, hiding elements isn’t something that users benefit from and is unlikely to improve your SEO.

Intrusive

Whether the obstacle is an interstitial, a deluge of ads or some other intrusive element, making visitors jump through hoops to find what they’re looking for can hurt your user experience as well as your organic visibility.

Often used in attempts to extract revenue or manipulate site metrics, these types of bad practices are what Google’s Page Layout algorithm, also known as the Top Heavy Update, was created to address.

Interstitials are now a common part of the mobile user experience. Google rolled out the mobile intrusive interstitial penalty to discourage site owners from abusing such elements. 

More recently, Google updated its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines to address this trend, stating, “A single pop-over Ad or interstitial page with a clear and easy-to-use close button is not terribly distracting, though may not be a great user experience. However, difficult-to-close Ads that follow page scrolls, or interstitial pages that require an app download, can be truly distracting and make the MC [main content] difficult to use.” 

Source: Google

Not all interstitials are liabilities. If “used responsibly,” interstitials pertaining to legal obligations (such as privacy or age verification), login dialogs and other banners that use a “reasonable amount of screen space and are easily dismissible” would not be affected by Google’s mobile intrusive interstitial penalty.

Pro Tip

Interstitials, that’s one way, essentially, to waste the time of your users. Sometimes, we’ll see some pages that are not going to load the content fully and then you click on the button and it took 10 seconds to call a database and build the content.

These are all tactics are made to artificially increase dwell time. It sounds very petty because that’s just wasting time of the users for the sake of fulfilling an SEO urban legend. But also, it is harmful to our [search engine] users. So, this is something that we definitely recommend against and that we reserve the right of taking action if it is really abusive.

Link Spam

Link spams are used by brands to embed links into posts for promoting their content, regardless of what the post is about or where it was posted. This process is quite popular amongst social media channels and is usually used by businesses to increase the number of external backlinks to their website in order to improve their SERP rankings.

Link spamming does not affect other ranking factors by search engines for web pages. Search engine algorithms do not judge the quality of a page with link spam, and neither do the readers. This is why link spamming should be executed very carefully by site owners to ensure that it does not send a negative signal to search engine algorithms about your website.

Types of Link Spam to Avoid

1. Cleansing Domains. Also referred to as “301”, cleansing domains are a form of link manipulation that is regarded as a “black-hat SEO” technique. This technique basically uses the redirect method in which new links to any domain are redirects, which is not natural link behaviour. If Google finds out you are employing this method, actions like Penguin (turning 301 redirects to 404 immediately) are taken.

2. Article Marketing. Low-quality content in itself indicates to search engines that a website should not be ranked high. If all your followed links on the website are self-generated and not endorsed by external and authoritative sources, it might prove to be harmful to your rankings and diminish user experience as well. It is suggested to not invest in creating mundane or low-quality articles just for the sake of generating links.

3. Single-Post Blogs. Single post blogs are also termed Web 2.0 Blogs. These are generally small blog pages on sub-domains of platforms like WordPress or Tumblr which are already not performing well. These are usually freehubs for content, with the sole purpose of acting as “link juice” for websites through social bookmarking.

4. Site-Wide Links. Site-wide links are usually used in the footer section of web pages, which are paid links or Google Bombs. This practice was crippled by Google as it employed the Penguin action to the overuse of any type of anchor text with paid links on websites. This practice is no longer safe and should not be used by site owners.

5. Paid Links. You have to entrust in the sellers that they are not linked spamming your paid links. Make sure that all your buyers of links follow this, as if even one of them buys links in bulk, it can be easily detected and be tracked back to your website.

6. Link Exchanges. Exchanging links is a safe practice, but yet again, it should not be done in bulk. This process requires you to put faith in complete strangers to acquire external links for your website. This is often termed as a “link wheel”.

7. Link Bait and Switch. Tricking users into visiting pages they do not wish to visit is clearly not a good practice. Search engines do not appreciate this tactic and flag or penalise you for doing this. 

8. Low-Quality Press Release Syndication. Press releases should be of high quality and convey the brand message accurately. Make sure to not use these service providers to publish press releases, as they will not generate good results for your brand and might even end up reducing your rankings on SERPs.

9. Directory Spam. How can you identify which directories to not choose? Just ask this question – Are the listings on this directory website quality sites and will they ask for money to be listed? If the answer is no to either part of this question, it is not worth spamming your links on these directories.

10. Link Farms. If two or more site owners cooperate and share links with each other to put them up on their websites, then it is called link farming. Link farms are used by site owners to build multiple backlinks for their websites. However, this practice is not considered authoritative by search engine algorithms.

11. Forum Spam. Forums are also a place where you can find a lot of links. However, their effect has basically been null and voided by search engines. When you post follow or no-follow links on forums, it has zero effect on your link-building authority.

12. Profile Spam. Links posted on authority domains often go through a phase of unintended follow links, which makes profile spam another victim of link spamming. This type of link spamming is abundantly present throughout the web. 

13. Comment Spam. Websites with authority have started using classifiers in their comment sections to weed out any link spam. Classifiers devalue any links posted in the comment sections. So, if you post any links on an active blog that has about 500 comments, you already would not generate any value from 1/500th of the link juice on the blog. 

14. Hidden Links. Hidden links can be put in texts, images, or the site code of the website so that the algorithm can detect them. Linking conversion pages in these hidden links is a common practice but can be a bad experience for users who did not want to be redirected to another page. 

15. No-follow Links. If you have an abundant number of nofollow links on your page, search engine algorithms will consider them as link spamming. There are automated link-building software out there that try to do this by using random links to improve the site’s backlink profile to avoid getting detected by Google spam detectors. 

How to Recover from Link Spam Penalties?

As a site owner, you should be aware of the manual action notification that can be sent by search engines. For Google, this notification comes in GSC. If you ever receive this notification, chances are that your site is flagged for link spamming. You might even notice a traffic crash on your site to detect this. But that does not mean that it is irredeemable.

To recover from link spam penalties, you can take two approaches:

1. Stop any and all link spamming activities immediately. 
2. Perform a thorough SEO audit of your website. This will help you in understanding the exact reason why your site is underperforming.