Detecting Spam Web Pages through Content Analysis

• Alexandros Ntoulas, UCLA Computer Science Dept., USA
• Marc Najork, Microsoft Research, USA
• Mark Manasse, Microsoft Research, USA
• Dennis Fetterly, Microsoft Research, USA

Full text:

Track: Search

Slot: 11:00-12:30, Wednesday 24th May

In this paper, we continue our investigations of "web spam": the injection of artificially-created pages into the web in order to influence the results from search engines, to drive traffic to certain pages for fun or profit. This paper considers some previously-undescribed techniques for automatically detecting spam pages, examines the effectiveness of these techniques in isolation and when aggregated using classification algorithms. When combined, our heuristics correctly identify 2,037 (86.2%) of the 2,364 spam pages (13.8%) in our judged collection of 17,168 pages, while misidentifying 526 spam and non-spam pages (3.1%).