Google and the spam report

[ownerrim]

I'm finding lately that spam seems to be making significant inroads in google, especially as regards spammers using doorway pages and redirects. I've read many times here that filing spam reports is about useful as spitting into the wind. Anyone here have any success with google spam reports?

[tedster]

Google does not immediately respond to a spam report by removing those pages by hand -- in fact they might not ever change anything at all related to those specific domains -- and then again they might.

They do study the spam reports that they openly solicit -- taking that as input from users that may indicate places they can beef up their ranking algorithms. They are working toward an algorithmic and automated solution rather than an indefinite series of hand tweaks. Of course, they have not yet arrived at the goal.

One kind of report where I have seen Google take quick (and obviously manual) action is when the spam puts adult sites into the results of non-adult keywords and bypasses their Adult filter.

[ownerrim]

Pretty much what I thought. I was just hoping for some stories of success. I filed my first spam report recently due to an individual landing 6 spots on a google results page with spam pages. All 6 pages are doorway pages leading to an contextual ad page on which the back button has been disabled.

Automated approaches don't completely cut it. The interesting thing is, as much as I don't like yahoo, they don't seem to have the same types of spam problems. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but that seems to be what I'm seeing.

[Lorel]

I reported a site to Google's spam report about a month ago that 302 hijacked a client of mine, and Google AdSense (as they were displaying ads) and every where else on Google I could think of. We also wrote the owner of the site and the host of the company.

Nothing happened for 3 weeks when I noticed they also had massive hidden text on every page that also had a 302 redirect to everyone they linked to (over 150 pages of hidden text). I reported them to Google Spam again. This time I also reported them to Yahoo spam and MSN feedback. Yesterday that site was not showing up in the site command other than home page on any engine and it had hundreds of pages.

If it would have been an honest host they would have taken the whole site down and there would be no home page showing and they never replied to the letter 4 weeks ago.

So it seems to me it was the search engines that took all but the home pages down because after the hidden text reports the site went down within 5 days on all 3 engines.

[steveb]

Google acts on spam reports somewhere between two days and infinity. They often hand remove or make quick algo changes to remove pages, but sometimes they don't. Redirects disappear quickly pretty often, which should not be surprising since they are the most objectively obvious thing to see.