April 19th, 2004, 12:28 AM
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web designer
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Join Date: Aug 2003
Location: designing a web site in columbus ohio
Posts: 2,993
Time spent in forums: 3 h 49 m 3 sec
Reputation Power: 8
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gigablast article
interview with gigablast designer
an article about search engine design.
an excerpt---
Quote: Spam
SK I'm not surprised spam is still a big issue. Most of the audience is familiar with e-mail spam; can you describe what spam is for a search engine?
MW Gladly. Search engine spam is not exactly the same as e-mail spam. Taken as a verb, when you spam a search engine, you are trying to manipulate the ranking algorithm in order to increase the rank of a particular page or set of pages. As a noun, it is any page whose rank is artificially inflated by such tactics.
Spam is a huge problem for search engines today. Nobody is accountable on the Internet and anybody can publish anything they want. A large percentage of the content on the Web is spam. The spammers are highly motivated to garner as many high-ranking positions as they can. It translates directly into more financial rewards.
One of the simplest ways to subvert a search engine, or at least try to, is to repeat keywords in the Web page. This tactic worked well in the mid-90s but not so much anymore.
One of the more common methods today is link spamming. Webmasters and SEOers [SEO stands for search engine optimization] exchange links with each other to fool the link analysis algorithms that all the big engines employ. Some of the more evil Webmasters will purchase hundreds of IPs supporting thousands of domains hosting millions of randomly generated pages. So you get this entirely artificial Web community that boosts itself to the top of the results.
Each page has something like 1,000 random words. These guys are aiming for the tail end of the normal distribution. So anytime someone searches for a somewhat unpopular combination of terms, these spammers come up on top. Banning their IP addresses is not enough, because they move their domains around on a monthly basis.
SK Sounds like a major pain.
MW It is. Our own little slice of hell.
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