In MSN's continued strive to make the best search engine on the planet, they come back to the forums and boldly ask Webmasters, What is Spam? A WebmasterWorld thread started by MSNdude, asks;
Everyone complains about Spam, but the single term hides a multitude of different problems, and different people often seem to mean different things when they use it. I know how we use the term here at Microsoft, but I would be interested to hear your ideas about it; there seems to be enough difference of opinion to make for an interesting discussion.
This post comes soon after MSN asked What Are Quality & Authoritative Sites?. So let's do the same here and try to pull nuggets out of MSN's posts.
(1) MSN talks about "hierarchy of spam," some spam pages being spammier than others.
(2) MSN asks if affiliate sites are spam?
(3) Interesting how MSN seems to imply that an authority or quality site, may be consider spam. And if so, "Is it worth losing a quality or authority result to get rid of a spam result?" Hmm...
(4) Spam is not junk pages. Junk pages are useless. Spam can be useful information. And I quote;
If a page is a useless result for any imaginable query, we call it "junk" not spam. A junk page could be "under construction" or it could be gibberish surrounded by ads, or even a page full of fake links.
(5) MSNdude defines spam as; "A fair definition would be a bad search engine result caused by someone doing something over and over again where once should have been enough, but I'm not sure it'll work to just call ALL bad results "spam.""
(6) MSN suffers a lot from "obscure Javascript redirects" than other spam tactics.
Lots of good information in that thread.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
