What is the purpose of spam? Well, when it is in your “inbox” it is usually a phishing agent trying to get information that can be sold (money), when it is in search results it is a bit more direct (money). Either way, your information is valuable and your wallet is more direct.
Bill Slawski turned up a very interesting paper that is about what Microsoft is doing to catch the spam (money).
Last October, the Live.com research team noticed three doorway pages showing up in the top ten search results for the search phrase “Cheap Ticket” and decided to investigate further.
When someone clicked on one of those pages, they were redirected to other pages recognized as being involved in spamming search engines. They also saw advertisements on the pages to which traffic was being redirected, from a company that they believed to be legitimate and not involved in misleading and misdirecting search engines.
Here is the paper, and here is the abstract:
Spammers use questionable search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to promote their spam links into top search results. In this paper, we focus on one prevalent type of spam – redirection spam – where one can identify spam pages by the third-party domains that these pages redirect traffic to. We propose a fivelayer, double-funnel model for describing end-to-end redirection spam, present a methodology for analyzing the layers, and identify prominent domains on each layer using two sets of commercial keywords – one targeting spammers and the other targeting advertisers. The methodology and findings are useful for search engines to strengthen their ranking algorithms against spam, for legitimate website owners to locate and remove spam doorway pages, and for legitimate advertisers to identify unscrupulous syndicators who serve ads on spam pages.
Who wins? We all do!
When search engines filter out spam the user gets the information that they are looking for, and if you or I are the providers, we get the benefit and the user will benefit further.
Read the paper, it is good. If you want to comment or discuss, feel free to comment here!
