Spam Taxonomy

• Author: Zoltán Gyöngyi, Hector Garcia-Molina
• Name: Web Spam Taxonomy
• Link: http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/771/1/2005-9.pdf

WC 140 / RT 1min

Web spamming refers to actions intended to mislead search engines into ranking some pages higher than they deserve. The primary consequence of web spamming is that the quality of search results decreases. The secondary consequence of spamming is that search engine indexes are inflated with useless pages, increasing the cost of each processed query.

We use the term spamming (also, spamdexing) to refer to any deliberate human action that is meant to trigger an unjustifiably favorable relevance or importance for some web page, considering the page’s true value.

All types of actions intended to boost ranking (either relevance, or importance, or both), without improving the true value of a page, are considered spamming.

Spamming techniques:

• Body spam
• Title spam
• Meta tag spam
• Anchor text spam
• Repetition of terms
• Dumping large number of unrelated terms
• Weaving of spam terms into contents