Spam is a very dirty word online. You only have to mention it to send hordes of search engine optimisation experts and webmasters into a panic. In order to understand how to avoid spam in the course of your site’s optimisation, it is necessary to understand exactly what spam is, and how it got to be what it is today.

Technically, spam is anything that abuses electronic messaging. This, as you might guess, covers a fairly broad area. One of the earlier forms of spam was unsolicited bulk emails, which were so frequent in the early 1990s that they were known as UBEs. Spam mail is, as anyone with an inbox knows, still very common. Since then, however, spam has moved on to bigger and much more subtle forms that can have a huge effect on your site.

How spam was born

The first instances of spam were on early internet forums in the 1980s. The term allegedly comes from the famous Monty Python sketch in a British café where the entire menu consists of the tinned meat product Spam. When users of forums disliked what other participants were saying, they would type ’spam’ over and over until the disliked user was pushed off the page.

Spam as we know it today is the unlovable child of internet marketing. When the potential of the internet was first being realised, email inboxes were recognised as an easy point of contact with internet markets. These inboxes were also unusually vulnerable, even more so than a regular mailbox. Companies began to work on forms of direct-to-consumer advertising that would entice internet users to read their messages.

Spam and SEO

When it comes to your site’s search engine optimization, the form of spam you need to be concerned about is search engine spam. This form of spam is also known as spamdexing, and the techniques involved are generally known as black-hat SEO techniques. Search engine spam is something that the search engines, with typical mystery, have failed to provide a conclusive definition on. Essentially, anything you do on your site that is designed to deceive the search engines.

There is a fine line between acceptable optimisation and spam, and that line shifts constantly. This is one of the many reasons to seek professional advice when you optimise your site. Talk to our experts at SEO Consult Australia about the possible pitfalls of optimisation.

What spam is today

The term ’spam’ covers a multitude of terms. It still includes junk mail, but now spammers have also invaded the social networks, newsgroups, blog comments, forums, and even spam in internet advertising and Wikipedia. Spam has moved across technologies as well, and now we have mobile phone spam and fax spam.

The reason to avoid making a connection between spam and your business is a very simple one. Every human being who regularly accesses the net is absolutely sick of spam. It’s everywhere, it’s annoying, and at times it’s even dangerous. Being associated with spam is much like being associated with criminal activity.