Recognizing Nepotistic Links on the Web

[NFFC]

Brian D. Davison was at Rutgers working on the Disco project when he wrote this, well worth a read both in general and for the Teoma buffs:

we wish to recognize and eliminate nepotistic links --- links between pages that are present for reasons other than merit

[cs.rutgers.edu...]

[IanTurner]

Interesting, though it really glosses over the major way that most webmasters actually manipulate link popularity which is by reciprocal link exchange.

[volatilegx]

What burns me about the paper is the assumption that links provided on the basis of financial renumeration like affiliate links are undesirable. Undesirable to whom?

I know for a fact that such links can be a valuable tool in finding products and services that I need. I have purchased through affiliate links many, many times. Plenty of legitimate businesses use affiliate programs and commission systems to generate leads.

The academics behind the paper seem to have forgotten that it's sales that makes the world go 'round!

I wonder where the web would be today without affiliate programs and other forms of advertising that the paper brushes aside so easily? How many personal home pages would there be? How many free information sites or forums like this one? How many "fan" sites?

It is the same Nepotistic links the academics are trying to ignore that are the lifeblood of the web. Working on a way to ignore them is not only hurtful to the owners of websites, it's counterproductive to the goals of search engines who want to provide relevent results.

[brotherhood of LAN]

Hey I assume that will mean less emphasis on navigation structure and any type of PR involving in-house links.

I guess that would be advantageous to unique information, rather than a large, vague site.

I didnt read the paper, im downloading it now.....

[JamesR]

>persistent, integrated navigational menu

Although I have benefited from this, I too think these links should be eliminated. Puts less pressure to keyword code every link on a site and it is easily manipulated.

>linktoyou.com

now infamous...good to see it get a quote here :)

Various filters used:

DNS
domain name
common links
page titles
page descriptions
IP addresses
ID of common linkfarm domain (linkstoyou in this case)
similar URL paths
contact email address

However, all these processes take CPU power which was not taken into effect in the paper. So, a theory is there, but not the practice.

None of this seems to be airtight, just able to catch the obvious spam.

[brotherhood of LAN]

Well James R

Since im into the business of stirring up people in WMW, how about testing Teoma just now?

I know there are related threads, i should look em up

[ciml]

Nice link, NFFC, but I do get angry about this "Nepo-tistic links are typically considered undesirable..." basis for so many WWW data mining papers these days.

Imagine a large site with many highly specific, worthy nuggets buried deep in the site (this should be easy for you to imagine, brotherhood). The links from the home page of GeneralTopic.com, through the categories and down to individual pages lead to these nuggets, which are absolutely the most useful places to end up when you're looking for something. Yet most 'non nepotistic' links tend to go to the home page.

Put another way: CompanyX makes cars, is very successful and widely linked. CompanyX introduces a new site (or sub-site) for their latest model, but their internal citations should count for nothing because they're seen as nepotistic?

The problem is not nepotistic links, but unrelated links.

[onebaldguy]

I have a variety of web sites with unique content (but they are related to a larger broad topic). So I link to the other sites to give the users access to the other information (and as well as to increase link popularity.) However, I want to do all that I can to ensure the SE's do not penalize me for nepotistic links.

One concern I have is that I submit all of the sites to Inktomi via positiontech.com under the same account. Would the SE's have accesss to this information or would it be possible for them to link my separate sites, which would penalize my links as being nepotistic links?