Identifying Link Farm Spam Pages

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This excerpt comes from one of the research papers making the rounds entitled identifying Link Farm Spam Pages.

4.4 Comparison of ParentPenalty and BadRank
As we mentioned before, BadRank uses the following philosophy:
a page should be penalized for pointing to bad
pages. However, it does not specify how far it should go. If
page A points to page B, and B points to some known bad
pages, it is intuitive to consider B to be bad, but should A
be penalized just for pointing to B? For example, a computer
science department’s homepage points to a student’s
homepage and the student may join some link exchange program
by adding some links within his homepage. It makes
sense that the student’s homepage should be penalized, but
the department’s homepage is innocent. In the BadRank algorithm,
the department’s homepage will also realize some
non-zero badness value by propagation upward from one or
more other pages with non-zero badness values.
Our ParentPenalty idea is more resistant to this issue. A
threshold is used in Section 4.2 to decide whether the badness
of the child pages should be propagated to a parent.
If the number of bad children is equal to or larger than the
threshold, then the parent should be penalized. Further,
if the number of parents that should be penalized is meets
or exceeds the threshold, then the grandparents should be
penalized. This also makes sense in real life. So the threshold
plays an important role in preventing the badness value
from propagating upwards to too many generations.

Hey did you guys happen to pick me up a block of Swiss cheese to go with yours? To make things easy to understand let’s say we are only going to deal with the the top 10 results for any search. Let’s also assume that I am number 9 there are 8 people above me and 1 below me. I build a new website that is uber clean. No affiliate links, no adsense, clean simple design. I then spend a few hundred dollars and get a copywriter to write some really well thought out insightful articles. I put up links to these other 9 websites, and try to convince them to link to my new site. For arguments sake lets say 4 of the websites above me and the one below me actually do link back to me. I sit back and wait one update cycle and then I drop some links in to some new pages. Because I’m a tricky bastard I camouflage the links via CSS, images or some other method. On these new pages I put up links to every casino and p0rn website I can find. Then I repeat the process 3 or 4 times so the other websites build up enough associated “bad rank” that they start to drop in rankings, meanwhile I’m “clean” and I start to rise in the rankings. You guys ever hear of a queen sacrifice in chess?

Sphere It

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