Comments on: University Domain Conditional Trust Rank

By: Leaky Boat » Blog Archive » Thousands of spam pages on Ivy League university web sites

Sat, 07 Apr 2007 01:32:02 +0000

[...] University web sites are valued in the online world because search engines, it is rumored, endow them with more trust than the average website. So it is no surprise that spammers work hard to secretly get their own material onto those websites, by whatever means they can. The most highly prized sites are, of course, the Ivy League: Brown, Cornell, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, and the Univerisity of Pennsylvania. I recently learned that one wag was using the number of spam sites sitting on university domains as a measure of their importance. I decided to put this to the test. This was pretty easy to do, i just used google’s “site:” operator, which allows you to get all your results from the same website (e.g., “Stephen King” site:amazon.com). I chose nine phrases that I thought were particularly spammy, (enclosing the multiple word ones in quotation marks), and recorded the number of hits for each website. Here’s what I found: [...]

By: m1t0s1s

m1t0s1s — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 21:39:21 +0000

To Muskie: .edus have quality links and content and are often cited; there is no automatic trust.

By: CIT Holding It Down by Cornell Blog

CIT Holding It Down by Cornell Blog — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 17:16:32 +0000

[...] It’s nice to see that Cornell is not on the list of spammy .edu domains. Hurray for keeping the swine away from rich flow of University page trust! [...]

By: egthareal

egthareal — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 15:49:00 +0000

Do you have to actually “have” a legitimate doorway page on these sites or will comment spam work?

By: ChrisWebPub

ChrisWebPub — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 13:03:15 +0000

There is no special bonus for .edu sites.

By: alexf2000

alexf2000 — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 10:32:21 +0000

Moro, here is what I did: I collected 2000 top paid keywords from 7 search, queried gogle for 100 results for each keyword and then sum the hosts from the urls returned by google. Of couse I got more than 20 hosts and not all of them .EDUs, but I keep “trusted” forums and blogs for myself. So relative number divided by number of domains does not make any sense.

By: MORO

MORO — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 05:21:48 +0000

Oh I didn’t realize those were the number of pages that ranked on each domain.

So, if you were to take those numbers and come up with an average like the number of doorway pages divided by the number of domains, what would your score be Quads? AlexF has a rough 325.

Is there a way to edit comments?

By: MORO

MORO — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:57:35 +0000

I’m confused about the metric he used. Any chance you could clarify how he came up with the individual scores?

By: Muskie

Muskie — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:19:06 +0000

One flaw with .edu is it only considers American schools. The whole internet is too American centric, look at the division of IP addresses, some US schools have more than entire countries…

China for one is not happy with this and is supposedly just going to introduce high level domains and URLs in Chinese characters.

Does Google’s trusted algorithm consider foreign schools? Surely Oxford is trusted…