Definitions

List of Definitions and Useful Terms

Cloaking Cloaking serves different content to different web visitors. For example, it may serve browsers a page with spam content while serving crawlers a page optimized for improving ranking.

Click through Cloaking a new and lesser-known technique, attempts to fool human spam investigators and automatic spam-detection tools that directly visit the spam URLs instead of clicking through search results. It is primarily based on browser referrer checking and can be done in two ways: if the spammers own the website that hosts the spam URL, they can perform a server-side check of the Referer field in the HTTP header and serve different pages based on that. If the spam URL resides on a free hosting website, the spammer can serve a page containing a script that performs a client-side check of the browser document.referrer object and displays different pages based on that.

Cognitive Presence - the extent to which the participants in any particular configuration of a community are able to construct meaning through sustained communication

Link Farm A link farm consists of a group of sites using specific linking structures to boost rankings of one or more pages in the farm. Redirection Redirection changes the user’s final destination or fetches dynamic content from other web sites.

Social Presence – considers the interactions of teachers and students, as they formulate questions, expose ideas and answer questions.

Spamming We use the term spamming (also, spamdexing) to refer to any deliberate human action that is meant to trigger an unjustifiably favorable relevance or importance for some web page, considering the page’s true value.

Spam We will use the adjective spam to mark all those web objects (page content items or links) that are the result of some form of spamming.

Spammers People who perform spamming are called spammers.

Field In evaluating textual relevance, search engines consider where on a web page query terms occurs. Each type of location is called a field. The common text fields for a page p are the document body, the title, the meta tags in the HTML header, and page p’s URL. In addition, the anchor texts associated with URLs that point to p are also considered belonging to page p (anchor text eld), since they often describe very well the content of p.

Teaching Presence – deals with all those declarations of the students or tutors where the creation of a dynamic group is promoted, including social relationships, expressions of emotions, and affirmation messages

Term spamming refers to techniques that tailor the contents of these text fields in order to make spam pages relevant for some queries.

Cohort Analysis
http://redeye.firstround.com/2008/01/after-the-techc.html

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~imamura/208/jan27/hup.html

Viral Coefficient
http://redeye.firstround.com/2008/01/after-the-techc.html

Page Views Per User
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/12/06/blog-stats-page-views/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/page_views_per.php