New Technical Report from Stanford Discusses Link Spam

[rustybrick]

From Gary Price at SEW Blog, a link to a paper named Link Spam Alliances (PDF).

One line upsets me right at the beginning...

Link spamming refers to the cases when spammers set up structures of interconnected pages called link spam farms, in order to boost the connectivity-based ranking, most frequently the PageRank.

Its a new paper, "structures of interconnected pages" and to boost "PageRank". Its a new paper...

[DaveAtIFG]

<tongue firmly in cheek>
You link farmers should be kissing the hallowed ground these gentlemen walk on!

They offer equations that reveal how to optimize your link farms, when to get in, when to get out, and who to admit. "How To Spam Links For Fun And Profit" in one convenient package! What more could you ask for?
</tongue firmly planted in cheek>

Good find Rusty, but none of the darn links worked for me. http://www.google.com/search?q=Link+...utf-8&oe=utf-8

[Marcia]

Gary's link works

Link Farm Spam

Gee, they're even teaching how to combine two optimal link farms.

[randfish]

Almost all of their discussion centeres on how best to pass, amplify and then re-focus PageRank via link spamming methods. These are guys who clearly aren't in the SEO game.

The smart spammers are using far less linear systems that point across communities, interlink with real web pages in the space, hijack listings to themselves and others, etc. in order to cloak their presence.

When I wrote about this, I made a little diagram of what sophisticated spamming looks like:



Hard to detect and better to rank with.

The writers don't mention the value of on-topic links, subject-specific popularity or anchor text. I think the real value of the article for SEOs is to see how simple it can be for search engines to identify and block value from what Mike Grehan always calls "spam islands". The lesson here is not to use simplistic link farms.

Thanks for pointing to this Rusty - I never know who to credit with first finding these, but I'm guessing it was you?

[rustybrick]

Originally Posted by randfish

Thanks for pointing to this Rusty - I never know who to credit with first finding these, but I'm guessing it was you?

It was Gary Price at SEW Blog that you should credit, see the original post.

I didn't read the paper, just the intro, at this point. I was very turned off from the introduction.