Search engine encouraging spam and ranking it high

[Adam C]

I stumbled upon this whitepaper written by some Yandex engineers in 2009

http://www2009.org/proceedings/pdf/p1105.pdf

The main cut and thrust appears to be:

• SEO's pay for links with targeted anchor text
• The payment is an indication of relevance to the keywords within the anchor text

Results can then be improved by:

• Identifying commercial queries
• Using paid links to improve the results

From the intro:

Though paid links do influence search engine
ranking we do not treat them as spam links. Large part of paid
links occurs in legitimate pages along with other useful links and
often point to useful commercial sites. The paid links often cost
significant money and that's why they are deliberately prepared.
In this case, the anchor text always contains terms that match
some commercial queries which are the target site keywords.
Thousands of optimizers made this deliberate annotation by hand;
therefore one may expect such links to contain useful information
about their target. The ability to detect paid links helps to improve
search engine ranking.

and Conclusion...

Using this paid link marking up, the link relevance factors can be
calculated differently for commercial and non-commercial
queries. In the first case, paid links are taken into account and
used specifically to improve the commercial ranking, while in the
second case they aren't taken into account. This lets the ranking
formula improve the search quality, decrease the overoptimization
influence for non-commercial queries and increase
the necessary SERP variety.

I'd heard before that Yandex favours paid links in side bars, footers, etc. over editorial links but haven't worked in the Russian market before (though thats about to change), so interesting to see it here in black and white.

[Gurtie]

sounds refreshingly sensible, from a major search engine!

[BoL]

It definitely does.