Using Statistics to Detect Search Engine Spam

Using Statistics to Detect Search Engine Optimization Spam
An example of an application of statistical methods to detect web spam is presented in the paper "Spam, Damn Spam and Statistics" by Dennis Fetterly, Mark Manasse and Marc Najork from Microsoft. They used two sets of pages downloaded from the Internet. The first set was crawled repeatedly from November 2002 to February 2003 and consisted from 150 million URLs. For each page the researches recorded HTTP status, time of download, document length, number of non-markup words, and a vector indicating the changes in page content between downloads. A sample of this set (751 pages) was inspected manually and 61 spam pages were discovered, or 8.1% of the set with a confidence interval of 1.95% at 95% confidence.
Another set was crawled between July and September 2002 and comprises 429 million pages and 38 million HTTP redirects. For this set the following properties were recorded: URL, URLs of outgoing links; for the HTTP redirects - the source and the target URL. 535 pages were manually inspected and 37 of them were identified as spam (6.9%).

The research concentrates on studying the following properties of web pages:

URL properties, including length and percentage of non-alphabetical characters (dashes, digits, dots etc.). *
Host name resolutions.
Linkage properties.
Content properties.
Content evolution properties.
Clustering properties.

Internet Marketing - Easy as 1-2-3

Don't be fooled by all the misdirected internet advice available today. Marketing on the internet today requires a special blend of many ingredients. This article describes how to be successful marketing on the internet.
Visit hundreds of internet marketing sites these days. They will tell you all the hundreds, if not thousands of ideas and ways they can sell you some product or service to have you making gazzilions of revenues through the internet. Half before lunch, ok, it's tough, so it might take you until after lunch to get the other half of the gazzilion! Yeah, right!What they won't tell you is the cold hard truth. Being successful on the internet takes a special blend of many ingredients. These include time, education, experience, luck, and yes--money.

SEO - How Cloaking Sabotages SEO

One of the biggest newbie mistakes made by people first trying out search engine optimization on their websites is to try and cloak it. Most people don’t even realize that they are practicing cloaking when they do it and even perceive it as a legitimate form of Search Engine Optimization but the problem is that the big search engines will penalize and blacklist your site for doing it.

In a nutshell, cloaking is the practice of using keywords and metatags to show a search engine spider a different page then what your human visitor to your site is going to see. The purpose of doing this is to drive visitors to a site. An example would be a psychic site that uses the name of famous psychics such Sylvia Browne or John Edwards to promote its services even though they sell no books or services by those famous psychics who have high keyword popularity. Some high-ranking pages are cloaked simply to prevent others from stealing the underlying code but this is no longer such a problem as it is not just keyword content or metatags that the search engine algorithms look at nowadays when they go to index a site.

SEO - The Downfall of SEO Content

You can search engine optimize your website or blog all you want with keyword rich copy but if the information you are providing is stale, repetitive, robotic or plagiarized then you are not likely to attract many visitors. Furthermore most search engine spiders and robots will penalize you for plagiarizing and rewriting content from elsewhere by not including your pages in its search engines.

Another reason that your SEO content could be failing is not necessarily that you have committed the sin of plagiarism or being out of touch, but you may have chosen to search engine optimize copy for a product that has a glutted market. If a lot of people are writing about the product then it means you have failed to properly define your niche market in terms of how it will make a profit. Trying to make a profit in a glutted market is often useless and it is also a bane to SEO marketing as the keywords that are used to market glutted products are often too general and too popular to bring you the targeted customers that you need.

'Chromebook' For Enterprises by Google

The unveiling of “Chromebook” took Google one step further with enterprise notebook solutions. Chromebook is a notebook laptop that promotes Google’s cloud application and novel operating system.

Unveiled at San Francisco in the event of the annual Google I/O developers conference, Chromebook runs on Google chrome operating system and promotes the OS in not only the consumer market but in enterprise market as well. Google is currently targeting the enterprise business, quite evident from its enterprise solutions in terms of cloud based office apps for android and chrome browser.

Gabriel Consulting Group’s Analyst, Dan Olds states that "Google has invested in a long term business here by launching OS and devices and are not looking forth to make quick money. Chromebook provides people with a cost-effective notebook which is customized for the Google’s apps”. He describes the device as the “tweener” device which lies between the smartphone, netbook and a laptop.

Gartner’s Analyst, Ray Valdes states that “Google can harness the benefit with the continuous shifting of the users to the web. Chromebook is sought to be increasingly better netbook which is optimized for web, is lightweight and secure”. This device is not in competition with the traditional PC tablets and laptops; however there would always remain some overlapping segments in the three categories.

The first Chromebook would hit the consumer market on June 15 and would be available for instant purchase on Best Buy and Amazon.com. This device is offered as Samsung and Acer.

“The Chromebook would be sold to enterprises on the basis of subscriptions at the price starting from $28 per user. For schools and government organization, the price per user would start from $20 on subscription basis” as per the VP Crome for Google, Sundar Pichai.

Selling a new OS becomes little tough as software developers don’t look forward to write apps for new OS till there are many systems running on it. Same goes with customers as unless popular apps are available on OS, it won’t interest them as noted by Olds. In case of Google, it already has cloud-based apps which is an advantage for OS and the device.