Propagating Trust and Distrust to Demote Web Spam

Overview

Web spamming describes behavior that attempts to deceive search engine's ranking algorithms. TrustRank is a recent algorithm that can combat web spam by propagating trust among web pages. However, TrustRank propagates trust among web pages based on the number of outgoing links, which is also how PageRank propagates authority scores among Web pages. This type of propagation may be suited for propagating authority, but it is not optimal for calculating trust scores for demoting spam sites. This paper proposes several alternative methods to propagate trust on the web. With experiments on a real web data set, they show that these methods can greatly decrease the number of web spam sites within the top portion of the trust ranking.