Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
After 2 months having past, every last one of these 3 sites has moved up, not out, of Google's index. One is sitting in a #1 position, and the other two are both #3.
My conclusion:
Create a website; make it obviously spammy; report it; relax & wait for a brief period until you are 1st page.
I am wondering what experiences that you guys are having with reporting spam?
I feel like a sucker that was played and will never consider doing that again. It is plain that G really isn't interested in cleaning out the spam. The sites in question are employing techniques that are easy to spot.
If Google was really interested in cleaning out the garbage, they have the money and resources to do it.
Content is way down the list.
How many of those sites were adwords/adsense sites?
None of the 3 that I mentioned utilize Adsense or Adwords.
These were 2 of the first things that I looked at in the experiment.
As for links, none of the 3 have any that I can find in Google. At most, one of them has 6 links in MSN. So it's not a link, content, or Adsense/Adwords issue.
I'm beginning to think that Google regards spam reports as ways that competitors are using to bad mouth more relevant sites. Process is as follows:
1. Honest webmasters send spam reports about a website.
2. Google receives & categorizes these reports.
3. PhDs at Google theorize that these reports are an indication of how much more relevant the target website is, compared to those around it, and that these reports are therefore logically filed by the webmasters who own the websites around the target.
4. Same PhDs agree that the target website is highly relevant, and recommend that it be moved up the ladder.
5. The powers that be at Google heed the recommendation of those PhDs (after all, they ARE PhDs).
6. Spammy site gets moved to the top.
7. Spammer goes to the bank.
Algorithm solved!
Google acts on spam reports all the time, but trivial stuff like hidden text is hardly going to raise an eyebow, let alone a finger to nuke a specific site. Minor stuff like that will be handled algorithmically.
Ok ... I can buy that ...
But theoretically, since hidden text is considered spam, the algorithm is supposed to move the website down the list, instead of up the list ... Every "tweak" that has occured has seen the exact opposite happen with these sites. And with virtually no backlinks, and main pages that are all flash (except for the hidden keyword spam that is), that pretty much screams out spam.
If there is no pay per click links then it must be a link scheme.
A better strategy is if you can somehow get the scammer site shut down, or if you notice it go Page Not Found even for a moment, then submit it to Google's instant URL removal tool that only works on 404 pages.
The tool will instantly verify the page is 404 and 3 days later it's ba... bye....
" The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognise and block future spam attempts."
or as it should be ...
" The spam reports we receive are used to try to create scalable algorithms that can recognise and block future spam attempts. Unfortunately we are not very good at this but please be patient."
Spam reports have never been successful since they were introduced. That Google invites people to take the time to report these knowing full well that the sites in question will be unaffected is shocking. If they did react quickly and positively to spam reports the Internet would be a much better place.
The site is doing great in serps on 1, 2 and 3 word search phrases.
But it tells me that google canīt find redirects and it is blind to keyword stuffing and it is blind to dupplicate content.
It is time to stand up and face the reality that the time of good white had webmasters is ending up. ... Hitting for Darth Vader
"I found one spammer with more thant 20,000 pages in index. All of them ( i think all ) are having heavy keyword stuffing ( plane text ) and a javascript redirect on it.
Mostly of the keywords were the same only title-tag was different. I thought it would be waste of time to make a spam report because google wonīt listen though."
To be fair, I reported recently a site using redirect and another using hidden text. WebSpam Team has acted upon both reports.
However, I recall Matt Cutts asking for spam reports covering keyword stuffing too. I reported a site at that time, but its still there.
So it seems WebSpam Team hasn't yet found a way to deal with keyword stuffing effectively.
that is good news for my ears. I think they need these spam reports for filter tweaking and not for personal review. ( Maybe in same very worth cases they do a penalty ).
The sitemaps people claim that form gets read by the sitemaps team and they claim they take them seriously and act on them.
No matter what anyone says, I still prefer my method of shooting it down myself with Google's automated URL removal tool.
Fortunately for us, many of the scraper sites plainly steal content from our site, so about 75% of the time we are successful in getting their web host to shut down the site with a DMCA notice.
Then we have Google's URL removal tool instantly crawl their site, and it's gone 2-3 days later out of the index.
Also, if a site has stolen content from your site, send a DMCA fax to Google's copyright department and they will remove the offending site from Google's index.
For example, we sent Google a DMCA fax about one site, and now when you go an run the same search in Google, the search results page says something
to the effet of they ar enot showing more sults due to DMCA compplaint they received.
Take this long sentence from our site and with the quotes, and enter it into a Google Search:
"The engagement ring diamond I bought was 1.03 Ct. Marketing tradition says spend 2 months salary, and get the best diamond you can that fits the bill"
You'll see Google has this statement there on the results page:
"In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org. "
So Google removed all the offenders, leaving just our site, as it should be.
Your web site should be the only Google search result for a unique sentence off your site.
If not, then it's time to get to work before they drag your ranking down from duplicate content penalties.
