Fused Nation – UK SEO Blog

The 15th International WWW conference took place in Edinburgh this week with keynote speaker, Tim Berners-Lee and Yahoo (Yahoo blog link) in attendance.

“The World Wide Web Conference is the global event to bring together the key influencers, decision makers, technologists, businesses and standards bodies shaping the future of the web.

Organised by the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2) (IW3C2) since 1994, the annual WWW Conference has played the fundamental role of gathering the trail-blazers from the international community to discuss, debate and explore how to shape and develop the future direction of the World Wide Web.”

The website has a lot of resources from the conference, including research papers, podcasts and a wiki for delegates.

Obviously the chat was much broader than solely affects the SEO industry, but there are a few interesting papers worth a read.

I’ve just had a look over the paper by MSN Research and UCLA – Detecting Spam Web Pages through Content Analysis, abstract:

“In this paper, we continue our investigations of “web spam”: the injection of artificially-created pages into the web in order to influence the results from search engines, to drive traffic to certain pages for fun or profit. This paper considers some previously-undescribed techniques for automatically detecting spam pages, examines the effectiveness of these techniques in isolation and when aggregated using classification algorithms. When combined, our heuristics correctly identify 2,037 (86.2%) of the 2,364 spam pages (13.8%) in our judged collection of 17,168 pages, while misidentifying 526 spam and non-spam pages (3.1%).”

Not a great deal of tangible use for SEOs but it certainly gives the industry a better idea of how search engines are approaching spam.  The report looks at identifying how likely a page could be spam based on x, y or z factors, based on results from a sample of the MSN index.

Interestingly one of the points that the report brings up is the use of different TLDs for spam – .biz domains take the lead with a whopping 70% of domains being labelled as spam!  I expected that to take the lead but not by quite so much!  .us domains follow in 2nd place with 37%.

A thread on Threadwatch earlier labelled MSN’s results as being pretty spammy, which indeed they are.  But reports such as this one serve to prove that MSN aren’t the search newbies their results make them out to be, which lead to my comments on the thread:

“Google was the same way a few years ago and became the golden child of SEO (and as a result, also general business) and made billions in the process.

MSN can afford to give the online marketing industry an easy run for a while – much more these days SEOs are taking a “screw Google and work on MSN / Yahoo” approach (well, more affiliate type SEOs than agency / client based side). That’s a big change from a year ago.”

Are MSN trying to bait the online marketing industry to try and recreate the success Google saw through 2003 to date?  If anyone can, MSN can.

Also in the news, Google announced a partnership with Dell to provide a package of Google software on their PCs and Yahoo announced a partnership with eBay.

Looks like the search engine war has broken well out of the SERPs and is hitting the real world with a vengance.

MG