Google's New Challenge: Keyword SpamBy Dave Mathews4/25/2008 10:52:00 PMSAN FRANCISCO--At the 2008 O'Reilly Web 2.0 Conference here, Google spam maven Matt Cutts' session on "What Google knows about Spam" identified a new threat: not the Viagra ads that clog our inboxes, but keyword spam on websites and rogue blog comments that plague online communities. Keyword spam is the use of words, frequently having nothing to do with the site content where they are placed, put into a web page in order for the page creators to get traffic directed to them from search engines. These pages are then used to drive advertising clicks from unsophisticated users or for spreading viruses. Typically these sites contain hundreds of misspelled words to attract users that quickly typed entries in search engines.This keyword text spamming does not have to be visible, Cutts said. Font and background web page colors can be matched so that they are invisible to browsers, but picked up on by computers and search engines that read the underlying code. But these tactics can be used for "good" under the analogy of search engine optimization. Known as search-engine optimization (SEO), this is technically not spam it's the effort to rise above the fold in search results.Google's "PageRank" a key to what makes their search engine so effective employs an algorithmic method of trust and reputation to help prevent this type of spam. While this is done though the company's monitoring cross-promotional links (along with some unpublished "secret sauce") eBay and Amazon use a manual user feedback mechanism to let people know that their community members can be trusted for commerce activity. Large sites can increase traffic by tweaking internal links and URL names, Cutts said. Small sites can get more traffic by fan and community cross- linking. But with the vast number of bloggers today, a second type of spam is much more prevalent: comment spam. Cutts offered these tips for community developers to eliminate spam in their platforms:
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