I saw something the other day that I hadn’t seen in a while. In talking with a client, I found around 20 lines of hidden text at the bottom of his homepage. This purpose of this text is to fool search engines into believing that the clients homepage was relevant for a long list of keywords that did not appear in the visible text. It can result in a penalty from the engines as it is an obvious attempt to game the system. I thought that it had disappeared years ago along with doorway pages, cloaking, keyword stuffing, link farming and all the other tricks that were so popular back in the day.

It got me thinking about spam in the world of blog marketing. It is estimated that a fairly high percentage of blogs are “splogs” an affectionate term for using blogs to spam search engines. The splog is basically a bunch of meaningless content with hundreds of links.

The key to avoid being labelled as a splogger is to write good content. Plain and simple. If you write valuable and interesting articles, you will be seen as an authority in your industry by both the search engines and by your readers. Then you will get more business and grow your brand. Here at Retail Blog Marketing we show our clients how to blog, not splog. We also show you how to turn your blog into a vlog, but that’s for another article.