GoogleGuy - 5:13 am on Jun 12, 2003 (gmt 0)

Q: What measures will be taken to combat Spam, will reporting help or will Google allow Spam to flourish?

A: I think shaadi asked this question. So shaadi, I think if you check the site that you reported for hidden text, you’ll find that it’s in the penalty box. Let me take this chance to talk a bit about the spam report system. From a webmaster point of view, it doesn’t take much time to file a report if you feel something unfair is going on. I would definitely read through our guidelines first to make sure it’s something that we would agree is spam:
[google.com...]
Reporting a site that you feel is spamming certainly won’t hurt. Now let’s talk about what sort of actions Google might take. There are some blatant things that we may take immediate action on. For example, if off-topic porn shows up for a search on someone’s name, that’s often worth doing something on a short time-frame. I noticed that you also did some other reports of things like duplicate content and sites that may be mirrors. Those are the sort of things that we probably wouldn’t take manual action on; we would instead look at using that data to write better algorithms. Our ultimate goal is to improve quality using only automated algorithms. Those algorithms may take longer to get right, but the nice thing is that when they’re done, they can often shut down an entire type of spam. So it doesn’t hurt to do a spam report, it gives us feedback about how to improve our search, and many spam reports end up as data that we use when testing our new algorithms.

[edited by: GoogleGuy at 5:24 am (utc) on June 12, 2003]