Agent-Based Spam

The use of Agent-Based Delivery to identify search engine robots by user agent and deliver unique content to those robots.

This is always spam because the unique content is designed only for the search engine robot to see, not for humans. This cannot be justified if search engines did not exist, so it must have been done only to influence search engine relevancy. Therefore it constitutes spam. Every instance of unique content on the page will be content spam, meta spam or both.

Note: it seems reasonable to permit individual HTML section tags such as title and meta description to be delivered to individual search engines. Reason: Since meta data is not seen on-the-page by humans visiting the page it cannot be content spam (and on its own site the search engine may publish the meta data as it wishes). As long as the meta data describes the page accurately and coherently, it is not meta-spam either. Therefore, it is not spam. To classify this activity as spam would result in webmasters having to conform to the lowest common denominator in delivering meta data, which does not encourage search engines to improve.

Rule of thumb: it is OK to target search engine robots by their agent name and deliver unique content in the section of a HTML document, but not in the section.

Ip Delivery and ip Cloaking

IP Delivery is the delivery of content according to the IP name or IP address of the requester. These features in the request header can indicate the ISP and location of the visitor. The two most common reasons to use IP Delivery are to deliver secure content (e.g. within an intranet or across a Virtual Private Network) and to deliver content according to the likely location of the visitor. Both these activities are perfectly valid in the absence of search engines and therefore do not necessarily constitute search engine spam. For example, it would not in itself be spam to use IP Delivery to determine that a search engine was based in Germany, and deliver the same content to that search engine's robot as to other German visitors. The content could contain both content spam and meta spam, though.

We will now define and discuss IP Cloaking.

Ip Cloaking

The identification of search engine robots by IP name or address and the delivery of unique content to those robots.

Using this definition, all uses of IP Cloaking are spam. This is because the unique content is designed only for the search engine robot to see, not for humans. This cannot be justified if search engines did not exist, so it must have been done only to influence search engine relevancy, therefore it constitutes spam. Every instance of unique content will be content spam, meta spam or both.

IP Cloaking usually involves the building and maintenance, or rental or purchase from a third party, of a database of IP names and addresses used by search engine robots; the identification of search engine robots using this database; and the delivery of unique content to those robots. It therefore requires a lot of effort and/or expense. In return for this effort and expense, the only feature that IP

Cloaking offers that other technologies do not offer is preventing humans reading the cloaked page. This very feature means that the content on cloaked pages is spam - designed purely to influence search engine relevancy calculations. There is no non-spam use of IP Cloaking that could not be fulfilled more simply, cheaply and reliably by alternative technologies.

IP Cloaking is excellent for hiding various illegal and immoral practices such as copyright infringement, trademark stealing and bait-and-switch. This is because IP Cloaking is designed to prohibit review of the methods used.

For these reasons, we do not consider IP Cloaking to be an acceptable technique for professionals to associate themselves with. IP Delivery (i.e. delivering content according to the visitor's IP, but not specifically targeting search engine robots) is acceptable. If IP Delivery is deployed, a search engine robot should receive the same content as a human typical of that search engine's users.

Clarification: If it is an IP-based technology that is not delivering what we define as Search Engine Spam, then it is not IP Cloaking but IP Delivery. In short, it's only cloaking if it is spam and it's only spam if it cannot be justified in the absence search engines. If a search engine has given you written permission to deliver unique content to its robots, and supplied its robots' IP addresses to you for this purpose (e.g. to enable a secure transaction) then, using our definition, this is Not Search Engine Spam. Therefore the delivery of unique content to robots with those IP addresses would be classed as IP Delivery rather than IP Cloaking.

Conclusion

"It was a hard path and a dangerous path, a crooked way and a lonely and a long." JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit

This document has attempted to set out guidelines and principles for classifying search engine spam. It has been written to allow search engine marketers and other industry professionals to objectively evaluate actions to see whether those actions equate to spamming a search engine. It is hoped that quality search engines, ethical marketers and search industry professionals will agree that this document lays out standards which the industry should strive for.

Within this document, we identified two types of search engine spam (content spam and meta spam) and discussed several examples of those types of spam. We would like to conclude this document with a few comments and guidelines to search engines and Web marketers.

To search engines

It isn't spam if it's valid in the absence of search engines - especially if it makes a site more accessible - so don't penalise it.

It isn't my spam if somebody else did it outside my control - so penalise them, if anyone, not me.

To Web marketers

Use Web technologies for the purposes they were designed.

Make your sites more marketable by making them more accessible.

Don't cloak.

Alan Perkins : 30/09/2001

(http://www.silverdisc.co.uk/articles/spam-classification/#top)