Yesterday Gary Price at SEW Blog posted an entry named New Technical Report from Stanford Discusses Link Spam. I, of course, get all excited about this new paper to discuss how to prevent link spam. I print it out and shortly later, I read the introduction on the first two pages. Then I stop reading it and start a thread, which I should have named New Paper, Old Methods, Link Spamming.
It is probably not fair of me to be quick to judge, and trust me, I will read the entire 22 page paper. But this line in the introduction turned me off, as soon as I read it:
Link spamming refers to the cases when spammers set up structures of interconnected pages called link spam farms, in order to boost the connectivity-based ranking, most frequently the PageRank.
Why?
(1) "spammers set up structures of interconnected pages" - good link spammers do not interconnect pages, at least not nowadays.
(2) "most frequently the PageRank" - good SEOs know its not critical when link spamming to get links from pages with high PageRank. They just get links from as many pages as possible.
This is just one sentence, you can read the full paper: Link Spam Alliances (PDF).
