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The paper reported on Monday in a New York Times story Researchers Track Down a Plague of Fake Web Pages is to be delivered in May at the 16th International World Wide Web Conference in Banff, Alberta, Canada. The paper’s methodology, finding and conclusions are of interest to search marketers.

For this paper the researchers focused on redirection spam (for examples of redirection spam) where Web pages redirect browsers to visit known spam controlled domains. Many of these redirection spam pages use pay-per-click advertising and frequently display ads from reputable advertisers. Many research papers on search spam are essentially descriptive seeking to categorize the various forms of search spam. This paper provides means for identifying not just how these redirection schemes work but points to who is involved in the schemes.

To unravel these redirection schemes and identify the sources, the researchers simply “followed the money” analyzing the end-to-end redirection paths (for more on the methodology and how you can use similar tactics, see Strider Search Ranger). In the paper they outline the methodology they used to analyze tens of thousands of spam links found for this piece of research. To describe their findings they created a five-layer double funnel model that includes:

- Doorway pages
- Redirection domains
- Aggregators
- Syndicators
- Advertisers


Spammers control the doorway pages and redirection domains, aggregators buy traffic from the spammers and sell traffic to the syndicators who in turn are paid by the advertisers for to display their ads. The system works both two ways.