links

TrustRank is a semi-automatic spam-fighting framework that propagates trust scores from a small, manually curated seed set of high-quality pages through the hyperlink graph to assign legitimacy scores to all crawled documents. The system exploits the observation that good pages rarely link to spam, enabling trust to decay with link distance from seeds while isolating link-spam clusters that accumulate inbound links without receiving trust propagation. Search engines applying TrustRank can suppress or demote low-trust pages during ranking, reduce crawler resources wasted on spam-dense host neighbourhoods, and prioritise indexing of nodes with non-trivial trust scores - effectively making large-scale link manipulation economically unviable without proximity to authoritative seed pages.