Do link spammers leave footprints?

[Kurt]

Here's a very interesting article based on a patent filed by Microsoft concerning how to detect link spammers:

Do link spammers leave footprints? - SEO and Internet Marketing blog, news and views

[freetraff]

Interesting stuff - thanks for posting.

I really liked the thing about "inlink death rate" - very smart thing to have in the algo. Lots of link brokers who sell the backlinks on per month basis might not love the idea, because they have a huge flow of sites that come and go, and change the backlinks.

That is why the solution is simple - build quality, relevant, permanent inlinks - and let the SEO power be with you.

[Jimbeam]

MS seems to be all talk, there spider is slow and ancient compared to google, they seriously need to focus more on content than spam.

[theGypsy]

Hey gang... thanks for the interest.. it is an interesting approach. I wouldn't even say that this is a MS centric approach either as those methods and related ones are fairly common really.

Here's a post that was based on some patents from Google on temporal IR signals;

Spam detection using historical factors - SEO and Internet Marketing blog, news and views

If you're interested in link decay, there is more on the patents here as well;
Link Builders Guide to Historical Ranking Factors - SEO and Internet Marketing blog, news and views

Another interesting post on spam is one a mate put up about paid link detection;
How search engines detect paid links - SEO and Internet Marketing blog, news and views

There is a ton of stuff that you can read on this stuff... I'd search for 'AIR Web' as it has a TON of up to date IR research on a wide variety of spam detection approaches including link spam ( AIR = Adversarial Information Retrieval ).

Understanding this stuff is important IMHO in making sure one doesn't cross the line when link building. Hell, there are even some Yahoo patents that look at excessive reciprocal linking and 2-3-4 way links;

Yahoo on Excessive reciprocal linking - SEO and Internet Marketing blog, news and views

Remember, Google also advises to stay away from 'excessive recips' - so these patents can be handy to understand the mind of a search engineer.

Anyhoo... there's a whack of reading for those with the patience to get geeky with their SEO :0)

Thanks again Kurt for dropping by and for taking an interest...it's always appreciated!