All About Content

If the marketing aspect of SEO is a little too touchy-feely for you, take a look at these two recent academic papers:

• The Egalitarian Effect of Search Engines (article | abstract and links to full text)
  Rather than high-ranking pages being made more popular by their popularity (and thus surpressing lower-ranking sites), U.S. and German researchers show that search engines actually have an egalitarian effect that increases the traffic to less popular sites.

• Link Spam Detection Based on Mass Estimation (Discussion | PDF)
  This paper introduces the concept of spam mass, a measure of the impact of link spamming on a page’s ranking, and a methodology for identifying pages that benefit significantly from link spamming.