Propagating Trust and Distrust to Demote Web Spam

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.

In this paper, we propose several alternative methods to propagate trust on the web. With experiments on a real web data set, we show that these methods can greatly decrease the number of web spam sites within the top portion of the trust ranking. In addition, we investigate the possibility of propagating distrust among web pages. Experiments show that combining trust and distrust values can demote more spam sites than the sole use of trust values.

In Proceedings of Models of Trust for the Web (MTW), a workshop at the 15th International World Wide Web Conference, Edinburgh, Scotland, May 2006.

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