Checks to curb latest SEO tricks

Asked if organizations such as content farms are outsmarting its system by flooding the Web with low-quality content to earn high-click rates, a Microsoft spokesperson said the company "prefers quality over quantity" to manage its Bing search engine.

"Backlinks, also known as 'inbound links', should be relevant to the page being linked to, or relevant to an SEO's domain if they are being linked to the homepage," he told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail interview. He pointed out that backlinks from sites considered to be authoritative in their field are rated to be of higher value than those from "junk sites".

Bing does prevent Web sites from appearing in its search results if they use techniques such as using hidden text or links within their Web page or create link farms to artificially increase the number of links, the Microsoft spokesman added. However, he did not elaborate on how the checks were implemented and executed.

Google adopts a similar stance. A Google spokesman explained that a site's ranking in its search results is automatically determined by computer algorithms that incorporate hundreds of parameters. "Our algorithms are effectively designed to prevent people from manipulating the rankings of competitors in our search results," he added.

For more on this story, read "Checks to curb latest SEO tricks" on ZDNet Asia.