Using Spam Farm to Boost PageRank

http://observable.eecs.umich.edu/mypapers/spam-farm.pdf

Some folks at U. of Mich created a Spam Farm to artificially boost PageRanks.

Well this is little project is good rationalization why companies like Google try to keep their site search algorithms a secret and are ever changing. Stick with an algorithm too long, and people, like the ones at UMichigan, figure out how to beat the system and make whatever page they want the top search result.

Another way that search engines work is that they look through the meta data found within webpages. The meta data is part of the html code that creates a page and is found withing <META> tags so whatever content is between those tags aren't actually displayed on the site, but search engine crawlers find it. Meta tags allow for sites to post descriptions about themselves that are sensitive to the algorithms used by search engine web crawlers.

Article about META tags: http://searchenginewatch.com/2167931