First there was PageRank, then TrustRank and now there is Spam Mass. Because today’s algorithms rely more upon off-page factors such as back linking, spammers have taken advantage of this by putting up tens, hundreds and even thousands of spam site all aimed at delivering links back to a host site, improving its PageRank and its rankings in the SERP’s.
A paper out of Stanford University, authored by Zoltan Gyongyi, Pavel Berkhin, Hector Garcia-Molina, and Jan Pedersen suggest that a unique method called “Spam Mass” can help weed out websites that are profiting from having a large amount of spam sites link to them.
Spam Mass can identify a major case of spamming by using two kinds of PageRank, regular PageRank and a biased version of PageRank based on reputable pages that link to a webpage (TrustRank). Where TrustRank tries to calculate the reputation of a particular webpage or website such as governmental pages and makes the assumption that reputable websites only link to other reputable websites, Spam Mass focuses on the untrustworthy sites and how these contribute to a designated host site or the recipient of the PageRank that is being passed along to increase that site’s rankings.
Spam Mass is another method that may be employed in future algorithm updates that will be useful in thwarting spammers who build bogus websites for the sole purpose of boosting their main website’s rankings. The combination of PageRank, TrustRank (which may have just been deployed with the last Jagger updates) and future Spam Mass update will undoubtedly bury many spammers websites in the rankings, which in turn will mean more relevant results for visitors to the search engines.
Here will be the new search engine tag line when this occurs: Better search with less than half the spam. Then again perhaps you can think of a better one?
