Spam is now a universal word. If you ask someone what the definition of spam is, they will not be able to give you a good answer. On the other hand, if you show them a piece of spam, they will instantly recognize it.

Spam comes in different shapes and sizes. Some examples of spam include crappy blog comments, automated blog comments, crappy website submissions, keyword stuffing on websites, nonsensical content in article etc. The point is, spam is everywhere!

But where does it come from? Do you actually hear people say: OK I am going to work now. I will be spamming the web today!

Of course you do not.

The truth is, spam is a result of anything which is done on the internet so as to deliberately game the search engines to make a quick buck.

In my experience, at least 50% of newbie internet marketers try spamming in one way or another to get more traffic and sales. They simply cannot understand how to make money the legitimate way.

Let us put things into perspective and figure out where spam comes from:

1. The all-famous blog commenting spam: If you have a well-established blog, you would know that for every 15 spam comment, 1 will be legit. Blog spammers fall into 2 categories.

One group manually visits each website, does not read the post put posts a generic comment saying Thank you, in broken English. Why in broken English? Because most of them come from third-world countries and know little about what they are doing.

The other group uses automated scripts, which have an even more laughable result. What the script essentially does is embed 3-10 horrible links into a comment post and try to get it accepted.

2. Directory submission spam: This mainly results in people submitting individual pages of their websites to the lower quality directory submission websites, which do not actively check the submissions. Some of the spammers even submit horribly-low quality websites (which mostly are affiliate websites) in order to get link juice flowing and make some sales. The sales never happen…

3. Article submission spam: Ideally what a person does is, copy someone elses article, add some bogus lines (usually written in bad English) and submit it to a huge number of crappy directories, in order to get more incoming links. The directories who do accept their crappy articles are low quality directories themselves with no authority, and the ones which are actively managed do not accept their content anyway. It is a lose-lose situation both ways.

4. Keyword stuffing spam: A newbie starts a website and wants to rank high for the keyword Credit Card Repair. He edits his website so the keyword tag contains all possible instances of the keyword in question, to the point that the search engines ban him. Some newbies might go to another extreme: They would stuff keywords in the title tag and in the content.

The conclusion of this article is that spam is created by people delibrately trying to game the system. Most people doing this know that they are wrong, but the smell of quick profits is strong enough to lure them into using these kind of tactics.