Optimal Link Bombs are Uncoordinated

We analyze the recent phenomenon termed a Link Bomb, and investigate the optimal attack pattern for a group of web pages attempting to link bomb a specific web page. The typical modus operandi of a link bomb is to associate a particular page with a search text and then boost that page’s pagerank. (The attacking pages can only control their own content and outgoing links.) Thus, when a search is initiated with the text, a high prominence will be given to the attacked page. We show that the best organization of links among the attacking group to maximize the increase in rank of the attacked node is the direct individual attack, where every attacker points directly to the victim and nowhere else. We also discuss optimal attack patterns for a group that wants to hide itself by not pointing directly to the victim. We quantify our results with experiments on a variety of random graph models.