Purchased Fame: Exploring the Ecosystem of Private Blog Networks
Purchased Fame: Exploring the Ecosystem of Private Blog Networks
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DOI：
10.1145/3321705.3329830
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发表时间：
2019-07
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Tom van Goethem;N. Miramirkhani;W. Joosen;Nick Nikiforakis
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文献类型：
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作者：
Tom van Goethem;N. Miramirkhani;W. Joosen;Nick Nikiforakis
对于许多人来说，浏览会话开始于在流行的搜索引擎中输入相关的关键字。用户随后登陆的网站通常由他们在搜索结果中的位置决定。虽然很少有人知道流行的搜索引擎所采用的专有排名算法，但人们强烈怀疑，传入的链接对结果有重大影响。这导致了各种黑帽SEO技术的出现，这些技术旨在欺骗搜索引擎来推广特定的网站。在本文中，我们首次对一种新型的黑帽SEO生态系统进行了广泛的研究，即通过私人博客网络（PBN）人工创建的反向链接的交易。我们的研究分为三个方面：首先，我们进行了探索性分析，通过它我们捕捉生态系统的内在信息，并衡量反向链接的有效性。接下来，我们开发并提出了一种ML驱动的方法，该方法通过利用生态系统运行所固有的各种基于内容和基于链接的功能，以98.7%的准确率检测PBN网站。最后，在一个涉及5万多个网站的大规模实验中，我们暴露了大型反向链接操作网络，发现数千个网站参与了PBN。
For many, a browsing session starts by entering relevant keywords in a popular search engine. The websites that users thereafter land on are often determined by their position in the search results. Although little is known about the proprietary ranking algorithms employed by popular search engines, it is strongly suspected that the incoming links have a significant influence on the outcome. This has lead to the inception of various black-hat SEO techniques that aim to deceive search engines to promote a specific website. In this paper, we present the first extensive study on the ecosystem of a novel type of black-hat SEO, namely the trade of artificially created backlinks through private blog networks (PBNs). Our study is three-pronged: first, we perform an exploratory analysis, through which we capture intrinsic information of the ecosystem and measure the effectiveness of backlinks. Next, we develop and present an ML-driven methodology that detects PBN sites with an accuracy of 98.7% by leveraging various content-based and linking-based features intrinsic to the operation of the ecosystem. Finally, in a large-scale experiment involving more than 50,000 websites, we expose large networks of backlink operations, finding thousands of websites engaged in PBNs.