Bing Bing's Approach to Web Spam

[enlytend]

Interesting post on the Bing Blog about how Bing flags pages as spam.

http://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2014/08/27/web-spam-filtering/

A couple of interesting points:

Presence of Ads – Just about every page on the web contain ads. Presence of ads doesn’t make the page bad, let alone spam. What we care about are things like a) how many ads appear on the page, b) what type of ads (e.g. banner, grey-overs, pop-ups), and c) how intrusive/ disruptive they are.

spam pages have inadequate content with limited value to the user. We use this fact to facilitate detection. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of signals used to make this assessment, ranging from simple things like number of words on the page to more complex concepts of content uniqueness and utility.

Do the ads take up the prime real estate or are they neatly separated away from the main content (e.g. in the header/ footer or side pane)? Is it easy for users to mentally separate content from ads?

Paying attention to these and other things they mention could help prevent your site from being flagged as spam (at least, by Bing!)