What Is Web Spam?
Connecting to the World Wide Web gives us access to a vast network of informative and informational websites. However, some of these sites pose serious safety risks. Scams, viruses and spy-ware spread quickly through a few websites. Learning about Web spam and how malicious websites use it empowers Internet users to protect their personal information and their computer.
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The Facts
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The term Web spam refers to all of the actions taken by specific websites to raise their rankings in search engine results artificially according to Zoltan Gyongyi and Hector Garcia-Molina from Stanford University. Search engines try to rank pages based on their usefulness as well as their relevance to the search term. However, Web spamming allows pages without useful content or with low relevance to climb above genuinely helpful pages.
Impact
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People searching for information through a search engine rarely look beyond the top 10 results, and very few look past the first three pages of results, says P. Takis Metaxas at Wellesley College. When unhelpful or malicious web pages manipulate their way into top positions, searchers don't get the information they're looking for. These searchers also may lose trust in the search engine when they realize that it didn't provide the results requested. Highly-ranked malicious results install spyware or viruses on thousands of visitors before the search engine catches them in many cases.
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Methods
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Web spammers use a variety of techniques to inflate their pages' search engine rankings. Text spamming involves stuffing specific keywords, usually comprised of phrases used for searching, into different sections of the HTML or text content on a page according to Hector Garcia-Molina and Zoltan Gyongyi. The rest of the text is often gibberish, but the appearance of certain terms makes a search engine think that the page is highly relevant. Link spamming involves making a page appear more popular by sending lots of links to it from other pages.
Prevention
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Most search engines battle web spam on a daily basis to keep their results helpful to users. Google, one of the world's largest search engines, constantly updates its ranking algorithm to work around the methods used by Web spammers, says Internet marketing expert Christian Kameir. By searching each page for instances of key phrase stuffing, hidden text walls of keywords or unusual linking behavior Google filters out some of the worst Web spam. However, spammers find new methods each day and the battle against Web spam is ongoing.
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