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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 4677–4681Cite as

Web Spam Detection

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Synonyms

Adversarial information retrieval; Google bombing; Spamdexing

Definition

Web spam refers to a host of techniques to subvert the ranking algorithms of web search engines and cause them to rank search results higher than they would otherwise. Examples of such techniques include content spam (populating web pages with popular and often highly monetizable search terms), link spam (creating links to a page in order to increase its link-based score), and cloaking (serving different versions of a page to search engine crawlers than to human users). Web spam is annoying to search engine users and disruptive to search engines; therefore, most commercial search engines try to combat web spam. Combating web spam consists of identifying spam content with high probability and – depending on policy – downgrading it during ranking, eliminating it from the index, no longer crawling it, and tainting affiliated content. The first step – identifying likely spam pages – is a classification...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Google, Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA

    Marc Najork

Authors
  1. Marc Najork
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marc Najork .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Google Research, New York, NY, USA

    Cong Yu

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© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature

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Najork, M. (2018). Web Spam Detection. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_465

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