spamdexing

Techniques employed by some Web marketers and site designers in order to fool a search engine's spider and indexing programs. The objective is to ensure that their Web site always appears at or near the top of the list of search engine results.

Word Stuffing
A common method is "word stuffing," which embeds a particular word on the page dozens or even hundreds of times. They may be invisible to the human eye, such as white text on a white background, but search engines see them.

Bait and Switch
Another technique combines word stuffing with "bait-and-switch," which loads the page with a popular search word such as sex, travel or antivirus, even though the word has nothing to do with the site content.

Search Engines Are Savvy
Major search engines always try to outsmart spamdexers. For example, they may automatically give a lower ranking to any page that contains a lot of repeated words. However, as soon as one method is successfully defeated, spamdexers come up with others.

Legitimate Methods
Site designers can use ethical ways to make their site get a higher ranking, such as inserting appropriate keywords in the page's <META> tags. In addition, the search engine itself may offer tips on how to obtain higher rankings. A good source of information is Search Engine Watch (www.searchenginewatch.com), which covers the major search engines. See doorway page, spam and Google bomb.