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SPAM FARM ALLIANCES

Images Screen Shots(related and exact details) Working Examples References Other sites reference URLs

Link spam otherwise known as spamming by creating backlinks is used for the development of a particular website and earn more business. It is an unethical way of search engine optimization which achieves what is necessary by misleading the connectivity based ranking algorithms in search engines. The procedure is commonly followed by spammers and hackers for their own website. As an expert I can say that I have come across several spammers all across our world practicing misleading optimization techniques and the latest in the book is spam farm alliances. A certain group of spammers each with already developed websites (also known as farms) interconnect their farms to manipulate PageRank scores of target pages and develops one's business. Alliances can be quite synergistic and certainly helps to collectively improve the rankings of websites of all participants.  

How Spam Farm Alliances work to manipulate search engines?

Search engines combine the results of ranking algorithms it employs to produce ordering of the pages returned as answers to a certain query. A best known algorithm PageRank [9] computes the global importance scores for all web pages and it is employed by every popular search engine. The scores are determined based on a webpage's link structure. As a result PageRank is a natural target for link spamming.

What eventually a spammer does is

1. Each spam farm has a particular target page. This target page is the one that spammer wishes to expose to the web user through a search engine. Therefore he basically focuses on increasing the ranking of that particular web page. As a website or a spam farm, the farm consists of several boosting web pages that are processed to improve the ranking of a particular target page and these boosting pages are under the control of the spammer. The same spammer also accumulates links to his target page from other web pages outside his spam farm. You can also call these links as hijacked links. The total PageRank that reaches the target page due to these hijacked links is known as Leakage. These links are not under the control of the spammer. That is, neither can he influence the PageRank scores significantly nor can he determine how the score gets distributed through outlinks or hijacked links. Thus the amount of leakage is independent of the spammer's efforts. All he can do is hijack as many links as possible from web pages that has a higher rank outside his farm.

2. In an optimal case where the target page or spam page has several boosting pages and few hijacked links, it can be assumed that the spam page has a reasonable link towards the hijacked links or good web pages and thus it certainly influences the leakage factor. Thus the target page accumulates its PageRank from the boosting pages and hijacked links. Thus under such a scenario the hijacked links also take part as boosting pages which influences the ranking algorithms of search engines. Now if the crawlers employed by the search engines are able to reach the target page via one hijacked link, it can be determined that the target page has a good reachability and thus is certainly exposed to web users using search engines. The reachability factor eventually becomes infinite and thus cannot be determined. The crawlers finds the target page and indexes it while the boosting pages connected to the target page increase its score and thus significantly influence the PageRank factor followed by search engine algorithms.

3. Spammers also make use of different domains for each and every page of their spam farms. Crawlers usually make use of domain directories to index web pages and thus the use of different domains eventually makes the crawlers to identify every web page of their spam farm and index them. At times they also make the hijacked links to point to boosting web pages instead of target page which makes the reachability factor even bigger and thus their websites receive a wide base of opportunities to get exposed and drive traffic to their sites and in turn makes business. All of the above mentioned points are undertaken by a single spammer and not an alliance.

4. Working in alliances:  In the earlier section we saw how a spammer works individually to boost his/her website. It is clearly understood that the leakage value introduced in the topic plays essentially very beneficial under optimal cases. However, that is just an assumption and it doesn't lie within the control of the spammer who has hijacked the links from reputable websites. It can go wrong as well. This is where the alliance comes into the picture to create an optimal scenario under all circumstances. Two or more spammers form alliances and connect their spam farms to create more links to both their individual unique target pages as well as boosting pages and hijacks links mutually. These hijacked links are from other spam farms which create a network of spam farms bringing spammers together. Obviously the crawler will be able to reach one spammer's target page and by the established network every spammer's farm will get identified and indexed.

5. These spammers have numerous ways to establish the network. As an expert I have come across two spam farms and this is how they had got connected. They had made the boosting web pages to connect to both the target pages of spammers respectively. It was clearly understood that they could have also have connected their target pages alone with distinctive boosting pages pointing on towards their respective target pages alone. Each of the style of connectivity has its own pros and cons which is very beneficial for both the spammers. They basically do it for mutual benefits or for financial agreements in way helping their own kind.

6. Web Rings: This term commonly refers to a group of spammers connecting all of their spam farms to form a ring structure working together as alliances and deriving good business and developing their own websites. In a Web Ring all the target pages of each individual spammer are connected together. The moment one spam farm gets identified and indexed by the crawlers employed by the search engines, every spam farm is bound to get identified and indexed automatically. Web rings where originally followed in the internet earlier in which web contents were organized. It was kind of a topology. Alliances were formed using the same concept and are a strongly connected group of targets forming complete cores.






7. Joining the alliance or leaving the alliance as per the financial agreements and other regulations were also made quite flexible and modification of the setup didn't take too much time for the set up to be up and running again. Once a spammer leaves the alliance, as the structure is a ring shaped one, the persons next to the one leaving will automatically link their target pages to enclose the circle. Thus the setup is always function-able no matter what.

8. The issue behind such a set up is, it becomes easy to identify all spammers at once as well. All the concerned authority needs to do is find one spammer and his network establishment will automatically take you to every spammer's farms. This is an ideal optimal set up but not a very wise one. So the groups of alliances tend to deviate from this set up despite the consequences it might have upon the farm's PageRank and they connect in a similar structure but not entirely the same where in some target pages are connected together while some target pages are connected to the boosting pages of another spammer's farm. In this pattern every spammers comes on board together to improve their own businesses by helping each other. And this particular set up is not as efficient as the Web Ring setup; it still influences the PageRank algorithms of search engines considerably to improve one's website ranking.

Conclusion:

Backlinks play a critical role in deciding the rank of a website. It is an important parameter for the search engine algorithms for producing quality search results. However, these alliance techniques employed to manipulate the search engines and improve spammer's websites and develop their own businesses in the process is quite unethical. As a result I have come across half the result sets to be filled with spammer's website at the top 10 related to any search phrase. As a result the business undertaken by genuine website owners, SEO firms, and other web development companies is drastically affected as they never get the opportunity to be listed in the top 10 to reach out to people and considerably they lose business in the process. Also the quality of the search results has degraded quite considerably consequently. The purpose of the search engines have been defeated subsequently and millions of web users gets annoyed as they are not able to find what they are seeking for at the earliest and all they are able to find is these spammer's websites providing irrelevant and poor information.

Images

The image is an example of spam farm alliance where owners of three spam farm alliances are involved in building link farms that manipulates the search engines and adds their sites backlinks to a targeted site. The ranking of the targeted site gradually decreases.

Screen Shots

The above graph shows statistics of the web spam industry in the year 2004.

The screen shot depicts spam farm pages with a target page, whose ranking the spammer wants to increase. The target page is usually a cheap low quality site whose ranking the spammer tries to increase.

The above screen shot is a typical example of a spam farm. Two or more spam farm owners join their link farms in order to create a spam farm alliance.

Click on the images to enlarge!

Working Examples

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References

1. Website malware sep attack spam link farm

2. What is link spamming

Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows

• Spam link farm

• PDF-spam farm alliance

• Spam farm alliances