Both Sides of the Digital Battle for a High Rank from a Search Engine

Because of the financial gain in achieving a high search engine rank, modifying a web page to unfairly alter its ranking has become a common practice. Techniques to achieve this are generally known as web spam because of the adverse affect on the relevance of the results returned by the search engine. This paper contains an overview of the techniques used to create web spam and the defenses available to search engines. In addition, we comment on why further research into combating web spam is required. This paper provides insights into the state-of-the-art of both sides of the battle to achieve an unfairly high search engine placement for a page.