Reporting Spam on Google

How long does it take? How likely is it to be removed?

[asomervell]

Have you ever reported spam and seen it actually removed? I've noted a couple of local sites in NZ that blatantly cloak pages and require login for anyone but Googlebot, one even says "welcome to our gateway page"...

I report 'em, have done for months, no result... Almost have to join em if their spammy SERPs are gonna stay so highly ranked.

I obviously cant post specifics but i'm asking if you've ever reported it and seen action taken?

[Brett_Tabke]

> Have you ever reported spam and seen it actually removed?

Not once in 10 years of seo.

> require login

not an issue. It could only be you that is required to login.

> blatantly cloak pages

not an issue unless they are serving different content. all major sites cloak content - even google.

> Almost have to join em if their
> spammy SERPs are gonna stay so highly ranked.

Let the engines take care of their site and you get busy taking care of what is in your control on your site. Build a kickass site that people want to visit and the engines will come around to you and give you the extra traffic you need.

[asomervell]

> not an issue. It could only be you that is required to login.

No really... full on cloaking... are you saying thats ok?

> not an issue unless they are serving different content. all major sites cloak content - even google.

Seriously different content... googlebot gets large pages of very SEO'd text, users have to log in before even seeing a single thing...

And the other example result on another site:

<keyword>.
<keyword> - FREE resources on <keyword>. ... Welcome to our keyword page that targets the keyword <keyword>. Please head over to our home page Improve ...
www.domain.co.nz/doorways/<keyword>.htm

I mean...!

> Let the engines take care of their site and you get busy taking care of what is in your control on your site. Build a kickass site that people want to visit and the engines will come around to you and give you the extra traffic you need.

Of course, first rule of SEO, just build a damn good site with good content. I've got that covered, run one of the biggest sites in the country, just hate weasels that stay up in SERPs with pages like the above...

I suppose i'm also eluding to the fact that individual spam reports are probably never individually looked at but go in a pool to be considered the algorithms is changed

[optimist]

Isn't WebmasterWorld now cloaking with the login?

Spam reports generally come from competitors who do not rank as well, and a few marketers who think they are getting 'points' in rankings for reporting them, most are just whiney complaints and would probably never get answers. Others feel they should just keep asking Matt Cutts on his blog why they did not remove the top ranking competitors site since it has to be spammy to rank so well - almost adding insult to injury there. There's alot of gray in this area as to what the standards should be and time plays an important factor. This is also a possible tool to ban a site if the submitter is creative and sets up a few things to appear as the owner did it.

Some well respected marketers do not have the time to do this and feel its not a good moral standard to report these. In all honesty if your doing well professionally, its hard to find the time to even edit your own site, and that should be the priority. Worry about your own site and make it better, spam will eventually trip a filter as there are LOTS of new filters, you can read all the complaints about those on many pots here.
:)

[tigger]

>Have you ever reported spam and seen it actually removed?

I've reported a handful of sites over 7 years and so far had 2 removed so not a brilliant success rate

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Spam reports generally come from competitors who do not rank as well

I disagree. I sometimes report spam but it is almost always through frustration when I am searching for something and find sites at the top of the results that don't have the information I requested. By this I mean sites who use shady techniques to get to the top for search terms knowing full well that they do not offer any information other than adsense links.

... and feel its not a good moral standard to report these.

And what about the people who make life harder for me by cheating to ensure that their irrelevant results appear at the top of the SERPs? Isn't it their morals that are suspect?

[Bennie]

I used to report spam, before I analysed it and used it to my advantage.

I once got 96 domains of a compeditor removed from AltaVista, I simply couldn't get past any other way. Massive link farm, using my designs and content as well.

A few years later I was in here whinging (as I once did ;) got PMed by GoogleGuy and they programmed him out over 6 months, which was cool to watch.

He totally kills it (cleans up) in Y, MSN and Ask, and good on him he's cleaned his act up a lot, and he's damn good at what he does.

/added/
The more you spam report, the less get's read - works for me ;)

[tiori]

Let the engines take care of their site and you get busy taking care of what is in your control on your site. Build a kickass site that people want to visit and the engines will come around to you and give you the extra traffic you need.

Well said Brett!

[Brett_Tabke]

> No really... full on cloaking... are you saying thats ok?

<same discussion - different year>
What is cloaking.
[webmasterworld.com...]
</same discussion - different year>

> Isn't WebmasterWorld now cloaking with the login?

Only requiring cookies for major abusing isps. same we have done for 8 years. Same content is served to google as well as visitors. see the bazillion on threads about it and the WebmasterWorld faq [webmasterworld.com].

[shortbus1662]

I report spam on a daily basis.

I have yet to see a site removed but I rarely go back to look.

[tiori]

I report spam on a daily basis.
I have yet to see a site removed but I rarely go back to look.

So why do you do it? Sounds like a waste of time.

[flicker]

I reported a spam network once that was deleted within a week or two. But the network was serving porn to people who searched for unrelated educational terms, so they may have been particularly motivated to get rid of that (as opposed to just some competitor of yours who has hidden keywords at the bottom of his page, or something, which they probably prefer to deal with algorithmically rather than on a case-by-case basis.)

[steveb]

Not reporting spam is like not reporting somebody stealing your wallet. It makes no sense on any level. Google acts on spam reports all the time, but a lot of what people call "spam" either only gets a minor scoring hit or isn't a violation of their guidelines or is so widespread that they only try to deal with it via their algo.

[straticus]

In my experience it so pointless reporting spam to google, I have been reporting a website that has exactly the same content on 6 different domains and is second for a competitve term, it has been like this for well over a year.

I find that those that run this forum appear to be on google's side most of the time which is most disappointing, maybe a case of "don't bite the hand that feeds you"?

Google appears to lack common sense, I'm glad I don't have a PHD it appears they are worth nothing..

[vincevincevince]

a website that has exactly the same content on 6 different domains and is second for a competitve term

They are second, but they are not third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh as well. It seems Google's filtering is working well as only one version of the content is being allowed to rank - the others being hit by a duplicate content filter.

On the original question - I have regularly seen sites removed after reporting them as spam. I surf a lot and report every single site which is trying to hide the spammy techniques it is using. No point in reporting run-of-the-mill hidden text - Google does that with an algorithm - but if they are using Javascript to add css classes to make the text invisible - then it should be reported because it is obviously beyond the range of the algorithm.

[Powdork]

I have seen several removed for obvious use of hidden text. Meaning lots and lots of reptitiveness. I have seen duplicate networks removed; but lately they always seem to be pared down to one set of content rather than removed completely*.
I also see networks that make a whore out of the pagerank system, and go untouched. I mean huge networks of interlinked sites that link freely to each other, but where all other outbound links are sent through a robots protected directory (after promising a search engine benefit from the link to the client).
* I know that analyzing the remaining data set is an opportunity; I'm sure someone here is using it or should be. I just don't possess those skills.

[straticus]

They are second, but they are not third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh as well.

Yes you are correct, but all of these sites are indexed and the pagerank from these sites, about 50 pagerank 6 pages and about 30 pagerank 5 pages seem tobe working, considering they have very few external incoming links pointing at the site(s).

Google also says they are tackling paid links ( what a laugh ) not from what I see.

Google is like a bad ref in a football match, nowadays.

I'm just lucky most of my sites are not being hit by what they are doing.

[JoaoJose]

I'm watching a network very closely. Reported last week and still nothing. They have everything. Hidden links, keyword stuffing, doorway pages...