Approaches for Web Spam Detection

Spam is a major threat to web security. The web of trust is being abused by the spammers through their ever evolving new tactics for their personal gains. In fact, there is a long chain of spammers who are running huge business campaigns under the web. Spam causes underutilization of search engine resources and creates dissatisfaction among web community. Web Security being a prime challenge for search engines has motivated the researchers in academia and industry to devise new techniques for web spam detection. In this paper we present a comprehensive survey of techniques for detection of web spam and discuss their applicability and performance in various scenarios where they outperformed the others. We have categorized web spam detection with the primary focus on the approaches used for spam detection. The paper also gives the possible directions for future work.