System and method of modifying ranking for internet accessible documents
View Patent ↗A system and method is disclosed for altering a relevance ranking for a web accessible document or page containing target content. A set of pages containing the content in question are intentionally imbued with spam features (or other characteristics indicative of low value relevance) so that a search engine is less likely to index or retrieve such page in response to a query.
1. A method of modifying search results of a search engine comprising:
(a) identifying a first target page, wherein said first target page has a first ranking used by the search engine in responding to queries directed to a target term;
(b) identifying one or more spam pages;
(c) automatically causing said one or more spam pages to create explicit links to said first target page with a computing system;
wherein said explicit links are created by the computing system at a frequency rate sufficient to reduce said first ranking and are included as hypertext markup language (HTML) content in said one or more spam pages;
(d) repeating any of steps (b) and/or (c) until said first ranking used by the search engine is reduced below a target threshold, without modifying how the search engine processes input queries.
2. The method of claim 1 , wherein prior to step (b), directing a first query to said target term such that the search engine presents a set of top N results that includes said first target page, and such that after step (d), said first target page does not appear within said set of top N results.
3. The method of claim 1 wherein said target term is a proper name.
4. The method of claim 1 , wherein said spam pages are obtained from an automatic search engine spam filter routine.
5. The method of claim 1 , further comprising repeating steps (a) to (d) for a set of second target pages which appear in a set of search results presented by the search engine in response to a query to said target term.
6. The method of claim 1 further comprising generating a set of spam pages to be used during step (c).
7. The method of claim 1 , wherein said search engine is caused to not include said first target page in a document index used for responding to said queries.