AlltheWeb.com is provided to you by Fast Search & Transfer International AS ("FAST"), a subsidiary of Fast Search & Transfer ASA.
Definitions
'Spam' on the web is material which is not intended to be of interest to people and often consists of Page Spam and Spam Stuffing. This includes material that is repeated an unreasonable number of times. Spam is generally placed on the web in order to increase traffic to certain sites, most often commercial sites.
'Page Spam' is entire documents consisting of Spam. Most such documents seem to be set up to give search services the impression that a web site owner is recommending the documents they link to, so that these documents will be among the first presented when there are many results from a search. Most Page Spam comes in large collections of similar documents, often repeating whatever material they might contain.
'Spam Stuffing' or just 'Stuffing' is material inside otherwise good documents, but which is not meant to be read by people. This may be lists of search terms that are unreasonably long, irrelevant or misleading, ("Search Term Stuffing") and lists of links that are too long or link to documents on an unrelated subject ("Link Stuffing"). Search Term Stuffing usually aims at bringing the document containing it high on the list of results when searching for one of the terms contained within the Stuffing. Link Stuffing works much like Page Spam, promoting the pages linked to.
FAST's Policy
FAST's policy, so as far as we are able, is to:
- exclude Page Spam documents from our index or at least disregard links from it when computing static rank;
- exclude borderline Page Spam when sufficiently large collections are found, or at least disregard links from it;
- disregard Search Term Stuffing when building the index and computing static rank, and to reduce the static rank of the documents containing
it; and
- disregard Link Stuffing when building the index and computing static rank, and to reduce the static rank of the documents containing it.
Report Spam
If you spot Spam which our processes have missed we invite you to report it by sending an e-mail entitled "Spam Report" to spam@fastsearch.com. In the mail please set out the search query you performed, and the URLs of the pages you believe consist of, or contain, Spam.
Spam Policy 2002-01-07