How Google deals with spam reports
Google published an interesting video yesterday detailing how they prioritise spam reports. Basically they look at how many users are potentially affected by the spam and order the reports based on urgency.
The spam report form asks for the keywords, query and web page so Google can calculate the number of users exposed to the “spam” site on a daily basis for both the target query and a list of related queries as well as overall traffic numbers.
In the video Matt Cutts said that lower priority spam reports for small sites/unpopular queries would probably be dealt with in the next round of algorithm updates rather than right away.
The takeaway here is that unless you are reporting a small site ranking for a major query then it’s unlikely you will see that result being moved very quickly.
Post category: Search Engine Optimisation Tweet
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
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Just recently we reported several cases of Spam for our clients websites, all of which are small businesses suffering from other websites duplicating their content, meta tags and so forth.
This revelation is a bit discouraging as unless you are of value to Google, it seems for the majority your query will be undervalued and possibly ignored.
matt cutts is a legend, thnx for posting, LOL.
Honeymoon to Kerala
Thanks for the post Patrick and for sharing the important info on how Google treat with the spam, resourceful information.
Hey Partick,
You have done really good job regarding Google. Appreciated.
Regards
Nayan Sagar
I have wondered about this as it was reported that a competitor could submit numerous spam complaints to get there competition removed. It appears it maybe a little more difficult then that.
Thanks for the explanation.
Nice post Patrick. It’s very interesting to see just how big the gap is between Google rankings and the other search engines.
Nice post.
It seems quite logical.
I am really intervene when it comes to spamming. I hate this part when i see my email there a lot of spam sent me. I know some sites to kick this, and thank you for the adding knowledge about it.
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September 14, 2009 at 4:40am
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