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"The Future of Search Series is supported by SES New York Conference &amp; Expo, the search and social marketing conference helping brands, agencies, and professionals connect, share and learn what\u2019s next for the interactive industry.\nWeb spam: It's the badly written, plagiarized, keyword-stuffed, advertising-packed nonsense that no one wants to see in search results. \nIn fact, \"content farms,\" as sites that foster and host such spam are called, have been a primary target of search engines, such as Google and Bing, for the past few months. As the content farmers' techniques become more sophisticated, so must search engine algorithms.\nMore and more search engines are fine-tuning their technologies to eliminate this type of content from search results. We spoke via e-mail to representatives from Google and Bing to learn what they're doing differently these days to combat web spam.\nHow the Search Engines Are Fighting Spam\nA Google rep said, \"We thoroughly investigate every report of deceptive practices and take appropriate action when we uncover genuine abuse. In especially egregious cases, we will remove spammers from our index immediately, so they don't show up in search results at all. At a minimum, we'll use the data from each spam report to improve our site ranking and filtering algorithms, which, over time, should increase the quality of our results.\"\nAs for content farms, Google has recently retooled its web spam algorithm to deal with poor and syndicated content.\n\"You can expect sites with shallow or poorly written content, content that\u2019s copied from other websites, or information that people frankly don\u2019t find that useful will be demoted as a result of our recent algorithm changes,\" stated the rep. \"On the other hand, high quality pages \u2014 pages with original content and information such as research, in depth reports or thoughtful analysis \u2014 will get a boost.\"\nWe also spoke with a rep from Bing, which along with handling its own search engine's capabilities also \"handles the algorithmic pieces, including relevance and spam,\" for Yahoo's web search. Together, Yahoo and Bing account for almost 30% of web search traffic.\nThe Bing spokesperson told us, \"Bing is able to easily detect pages consisting of machine-generated spam, keyword stuffing, redirect spam or malware, allowing Bing to effectively remove such sites from results. This is done through constant innovation... to detect the various evolving versions of the kinds of spam techniques we face. Additionally, signals that have been previously spammed now have countermeasures to prevent abuse. Bing has also developed several ranking signals to help weed out spam results and better understand the intent of the searcher.\"\nBut when it comes to content syndication and content farms, the Bing rep said, \"Unfortunately, as our methods to combat spam evolve, so do the spammers. Content farms are becoming increasingly common, and Bing engineers have started evaluating all of Bing\u2019s algorithms \u2014 not just those focused on spam prevention \u2014 to ensure a consistent return of higher quality results.\"\nOver the past year in particular, Bing's web spam engineers have been working on features to decrease the search rankings of spammy content, and the Bing spokesperson said the search engine is continuously improving its spam-fighting algorithms and also offers other forms of malware protection for web search.\n\"Bing actively detects drive-by download in our indexed pages and warns people when such results are shown as search results... [Also,] Bing actively detects scareware \u2014 where the user is tricked in to believing that he has download malicious software and is subsequently forced to either pay for fake anti-virus software or download actual malicious software \u2014 in indexed pages. Whenever Bing detects scareware sites or pages that redirect to scareware, Bing actively blocks them from the search results.\"\nSeries Supported by SES New York Conference &amp; Expo\n\n\n\n\nThe Future of Search Series is supported by SES New York Conference &amp; Expo, the search and social marketing conference helping brands, agencies, and professionals connect, share and learn what\u2019s next for the interactive industry. Learn why more than 5,000 brands and agencies from the enterprise level to brick and motor businesses choose SES for their online marketing education.\nMore Tech Resources From Mashable\n- Desktop Farming: 10 Gadgets for Growing a Cubicle Garden- Who\u2019s Really Scanning All Those QR Codes? [INFOGRAPHIC]- What\u2019s New in iOS 4.3- 9 Apps To Make You Super Productive on Windows, Mac &amp; Linux- The Future of the Connected Car"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/03/09/google-bing-search-spam/>