Are you ready for this?

If you’re a wannabe SEO (like me) and trying to learn all you can about the search engine game (important), you grab all the research papers you can that are released.

Here are a few:

An Analysis of Factors Used in Search Engine Ranking

Web Spam, Propaganda and Trust

Identifying Link Farm Spam Pages

Link Spam Alliances

A Personalized Search Engine Based on WebSnippet Hierarchical Clustering

Pagerank Increase under Different Collusion Topologies

Warning: After reading them you may find your eyes glazed over and a puzzled, dazed and confused expression is hardcoded across your face. What to do?

You head over to:

Search Engine Watch to follow the commentary there. And if you’re really wanting to just cut to the goods, you always follow up over at GrayWolf’s blog:

Algorithm Research Papers

I’ll sum them up in about 6 sentences:

* Spammers will exchange links with friends or colleagues.
* Spammers will buy links from external websites.
* Spammers will get links from directories or web forum signatures.
* Spammers build websites to get links,
* Spammers will link websites websites in a ring or pyramid form.
* Spammers do it to increase rankings and make money.

Thank ye Graywolf!

Gets a tad complicated at times huh.