Methods for facilitating the identification of link spamming in a linked database include calculating a spam likelihood value for nodes in a directed graph of linked nodes are disclosed. The spam likelihood value is computed from an importance of the node and a derivative value of the importance function with respect to a coupling factor. The likelihood that the node's importance is inflated by link spam is estimated by calculating the ratio of the magnitude of the derivative value for the node to the rank for the node. Alternatively, the spam likelihood may be computed directly from a component of the principal eigenvector of A evaluated at two values of the parameter c. The normalized derivative value can also be used to provide an order of importance in a list of nodes.