How Google Search fights Spam

In class we discussed on how Google's search program works and how it was better than its predecessors due to its ability to find the most relevant web pages based on what you were searching for.  But as always, there are people who are going to try and cheat the system.  These people are referred to as spammers, which are people who try to get their unrelated website to come up in any search usually in order to try and push some product on the user. 

There are three many ways spammers try to beat the search engine.


1. Cloaking- We talked about this in class.  This is the practice of putting the searched for word in the same color as the background thereby hiding it from the user on the site, but still having a numerous amount of the searched word that the search engine will read and therefore think the site is relevant.

2. Keyword Stuffing- This is similar to cloaking.  This is when a website plasters a numerous amount of the keyword on the website, usually at the bottom of the page, in order for it to get the search engine to believe it is relevant to the search.

3.  Paid Links-  This is when a website pays other websites to link to its page in order to increase its PageRank, which we discussed in class is how Google works by finding the importance of the webpage based on the "votes" by links on other webpages.

The paid links are a little harder to discover, but usually if a site has been selling links Google will no longer trust the links from that page.

Source:

http://www.google.com/competition/howgooglesearchworks.html#section4