Editing Spamdexing (section)

==History==
The earliest known reference<ref name="wspy"/> to the term ''spamdexing'' is by Eric Convey in his article "Porn sneaks way back on Web", ''[[The Boston Herald]]'', May 22, 1996, where he said:

<blockquote>The problem arises when site operators load their Web pages with hundreds of extraneous terms so search engines will list them among legitimate addresses.
The process is called "spamdexing," a combination of [[spamming]]—the Internet term for sending users unsolicited information—and "[[Web indexing|indexing]]."<ref name=wspy/></blockquote>

Keyword stuffing had been used in the past to obtain top search engine rankings and visibility for particular phrases. This method is outdated and adds no value to rankings today. In particular, [[Google]] no longer gives good rankings to pages employing this technique.

Hiding text from the visitor is done in many different ways. Text colored to blend with the background, [[Cascading Style Sheets|CSS]] ''z-index'' positioning to place text underneath an image&nbsp;— and therefore out of view of the visitor&nbsp;— and [[Cascading Style Sheets|CSS]] absolute positioning to have the text positioned far from the page center are all common techniques. By 2005, many invisible text techniques were easily detected by major search engines.

"Noscript" tags are another way to place hidden content within a page. While they are a valid optimization method for displaying an alternative representation of scripted content, they may be abused, since search engines may index content that is invisible to most visitors.

Sometimes inserted text includes words that are frequently searched (such as "sex"), even if those terms bear little connection to the content of a page, in order to attract traffic to advert-driven pages.

In the past, keyword stuffing was considered to be either a [[white hat (computer security)|white hat]] or a [[black hat (computer security)|black hat]] tactic, depending on the context of the technique, and the opinion of the person judging it. While a great deal of keyword stuffing was employed to aid in [[spamdexing]], which is of little benefit to the user, keyword stuffing in certain circumstances was not intended to skew results in a deceptive manner. Whether the term carries a [[pejorative]] or neutral [[connotation]] is dependent on whether the practice is used to pollute the results with pages of little relevance, or to direct traffic to a page of relevance that would have otherwise been de-emphasized due to the search engine's inability to interpret and understand related ideas. This is no longer the case.  Search engines now employ themed, related keyword techniques to interpret the intent of the content on a page.