SEO glossary · S

Spam

What is Spam?

Spam is unwanted, low-value or deceptive content sent or published in bulk. In email it means unsolicited messages; in search it means pages and links made to manipulate rankings instead of helping people, which Google’s spam policies forbid.

Search spam

Google’s spam policies name tactics such as:

  • Scaled content abuse: mass-produced pages with little value, whether written by people or AI
  • Scraped, copied or automatically spun content
  • Link schemes, including bought links and private blog networks
  • Cloaking, sneaky redirects, hidden text and keyword stuffing
  • Doorway pages, site reputation abuse and expired domain abuse
  • Thin affiliate pages and hacked content

Google fights spam with automated systems such as SpamBrain, regular spam updates and manual actions. Spam can be ignored, demoted or removed from the results entirely.

Email spam

Email spam is bulk email sent without the recipient’s consent. To keep your own emails out of spam folders, only email people who opted in, authenticate your domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, make unsubscribing easy and keep your list clean.

Comment and form spam

Bots post links in blog comments and fill in contact forms. Protect your site with tools such as reCAPTCHA, Cloudflare Turnstile or honeypot fields, and mark links in user comments with rel="ugc" or rel="nofollow".

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