International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 147 – No. 8, August 2016 1 Discernment of Search Engine Spamming and Counter Measure for It Sukrati Agrawal M.Tech. Scholar CS Dept. MIST, Indore (MP), India Antriksha Somani Assistant Professor CS Dept. MIST, Indore (MP), India Vishal Chhabra Asst. Prof. CS/IT Dept. MIST, Indore (MP), India ABSTRACT In today’s world everyone is glancing for online information through search engine. As there are lots of providers for information searched by the user, and it is not possible to display all the information on the first page of search engine. In current scenario website owners uses SEO(search engine optimization) techniques to be on first page of search engine result. But there are some owners who approach illegal techniques to gain high ranking for their website which is known as Spamdexing or search engine spamming. Spamdexing is a black hat SEO technique in which spammers spoofs the user to a web page which is not high ranked by the search engine in order to earn more profit or degrade the efficiency of search engine. This paper presents taxonomy of current Black Hat SEO techniques through which a web spammer gains high rank for his web pages & also the counter measures to overcome these spammed result. Keywords Search Engine, SEO, Black hat SEO, Search engine Spamming, cloaking, page ranking algorithm, Spamdexing, Countermeasure against spamming. 1. INTRODUCTION A search engine is a type of system software which search WebPages’ content in World Wide Web (WWW) based on the user query (combination of keywords). Search engine build the index of website content used for information retrieval. When a user submits a query to search engine then it returns a list of abounded pages that are most relevant to the specified query. Search Engine ranks the result based on its algorithm. Most of the internet the internet users are concerned for first page result. Some SEO experts also use unethical techniques known as Black Hat SEO techniques in order to drive high traffic on their website which ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the probability that the site will be at high rank in search engine result page (SERP) [1]. Fig 1: SEO working Process 1.1 Search Engine Optimization SEO is a process of increasing traffic to a given website by increasing the site's visibility in search engine results. SEO experts improve webpage relevancy by improving content, making sure that the pages are able to be indexed correctly. Figure 2 depicts the classification of Search Engine Optimization. Fig 2: classification of SEO 1.1.1 On page Optimization:- On-page SEO (also known as “on-site” SEO) is the act of optimizing content of your web site that affect your search engine rankings. It includes providing good content, good keywords selection, putting keywords on correct tags and calculating the keyword density of a page. 1.1.2 Off page Optimization: Off-page SEO focuses on increasing the inbound links to go websites. It includes link building, increasing link popularity by submitting open directories, search engines, link exchange, etc. 1.1.3 White Hat SEO - It’s good optimization techniques that fulfill search engines guidelines and lasts long time. It includes keyword research, keyword analysis, re- writing of Meta tags or Meta contents. Its main aim is to promote accessibility of both users and Search engine. 1.1.4 Black Hat SEO – Search engine techniques used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner by going against current search engine guidelines are known as Black hat SEO. These techniques are also known as spamdexing. Black hat SEO techniques include stuffing of keywords, doorway and cloaked pages, link farming, hidden texts and links and blog comment spam. 1.2 State-Of-The-Art Spamdexing Techniques Spamdexing is a combination of two word “spam” and “indexing,” that refers to the art of search engine spamming which causes deliberate manipulation of search engine rankings result in order to get more users’ hits on an undeserving website to acquire higher ranking in major search engines. Fig 3 depicts the classification of spamming techniques. SEO Types Techniques On-Page Black Hat Off- Page White Hat