DSpin: Detecting Automatically Spun Content on the Web Qing Zhang David Y. Wang Geoffrey M. Voelker University of California, San Diego University of California, San Diego University of California, San Diego
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract—Web spam is an abusive search engine optimization promoted. The belief is that these “backlinks”, as well as technique that artificially boosts the search result rank of pages keywords, will increase the page rank of the promoted sites promoted in the spam content. A popular form of Web spam in Web search results, and consequently attract more traffic to today relies upon automated spinning to avoid duplicate detection. the promoted sites. Search engines seek to identify duplicate Spinning replaces words or phrases in an input article to pages with artificial backlinks to penalize them in the page create new versions with vaguely similar meaning but sufficiently rank calculation, but spinning evades detection by producing different appearance to avoid plagiarism detectors. With just a few clicks, spammers can use automated tools to spin a selected artificial content that masquerades as original. article thousands of times and then use posting services via There are two ways content can be spun. The first is to proxies to spam the spun content on hundreds of target sites. employ humans to spin the content, as exemplified by the The goal of this paper is to develop effective techniques to detect automatically spun content on the Web. Our approach is directly many spinning jobs listed on pay-for-hire Web sites such as tied to the underlying mechanism used by automated spinning Fiverr and Freelancer [26].