Spam Comments and Search Engines
The growing number of blogs has caused problems for search engines, problems such as the highly frequent blog spam. Spammers use blogs to promote their websites. Spammers are trying to win the attention of search engines, not of bloggers or their readers.
Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of search engine spamming done manually or automatically by posting random comments, promoting commercial services, to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly-accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target of ‘Link Spam‘ (Wikipedia, 2006b). This is the placing or solicitation of links randomly on other sites, placing a desired keyword into the hyperlinked text of the backlink. Blogs, guest books, forums and any site that accepts visitors’ comments are particular targets and are often victims of drive-by spamming, where automated software creates nonsense posts with links that are usually irrelevant and unwanted (Wikipedia, 2006a).
Link spam dishonestly and deliberately manipulates link-based ranking algorithms of search engines like Google’s PageRank to increase the rank of a web site or page so that it is placed as close to the top of search results as possible. A link-based ranking algorithm gives a higher ranking to a site that has many backlinks, especially from highly-ranked sites/pages.
The link spammers’ underlying assumption is that link spam within the comments of blogs increases traffic to a site from search engines and optimizes site backlinks to help search engines index the site better. The big advantage of this to spammers and marketers/advertisers is that it probably gives their site a great PageRank (Google’s ranking algorithm). The more links the spammers can propagate across the Web, the better their rankings in the search engine results.
According to the PageRank methodology explanation, Google interprets a link from page ‘A’ to page ‘B’ as a vote, by page ‘A’, for page ‘B’. But Google considers more than the sheer volume of votes, or [back]links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important" (Google, 2006).
If site ‘A’ links to site ‘B’, Google calculates this as a vote for site ‘B’. The higher the number of votes, the higher the overall value for site ‘B’. In a perfect web society, this would be true. However, some bloggers and authors abuse the system, implementing ‘link spam’ and Google bombing: linking to web sites that have little or nothing to contribute. It is obvious that web bloggers and authors have been able to "bomb" Google and are still playing with Google and other search engines.
Spammers may use different methods to spam, for example they may praise other blogs, linking to their own site/page. However, in some cases it is not clear whether it is spam or not. Therefore, not all blog comments are spam. But now the question arises, "Do search engines use backlinks in blog comments to crawl and rank web sites?" When a search engine crawls a blog comment, its crawler reads what the anchor text says about the page that it is linked to, and then follows each link to index the target page/site and the topic or theme of the page. From a search engine’s point of view, anchor text determines the topic of the page the link points to.
A simple search on Google shows that it displays blog comments and thus it presents site backlinks in blog comments. For example,
"Comments +on" site:blogspot.com
It seems that backlinks in comments can increase the visibility, popularity and PageRank of backlinked sites. However, Google does not allow a link search to be restricted to a special site. Therefore, it is not possible to perform a combination search with link command (i.e. link:). For example,
link:webology.ir AND site:blogspot.com
But it is possible to perform a combination search with link command on Yahoo. A link search shows that Yahoo counts links in certain blog comments for the Webology site and blog. For example,
linkdomain:webology.persianblog.com AND site:netbib.de
linkdomain:webology.ir AND site:netbib.de
linkdomain:webology.ir AND site:blogspot.com
References:
- Google (2006). Our search: Google technology, PageRank explained. Retrieved Mach 25, 2006 from http://www.google.com/technology/index.html
- Hicks, Matthew (2005, January 18). Search Engines, Bloggers Team to Fight Spam. eWeek. Retrieved Mach 25, 2006 from http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1752331,00.asp
- MSN (2005, January 18). Working Together Against Blog Spam. MSN Search’s WebLog. Retrieved Mach 25, 2006 from http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/01/18/nofollow_tags.aspx
- Wikipedia (2006a). Spam in blogs. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved Mach 25, 2006 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_in_blogs
- Wikipedia (2006b). Spamdexing. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved Mach 25, 2006 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing
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Thanks to Link Specialist for the info.
