Google spam reporting a complete joke?

Message asking whether Google spam reporting tool works or not

[fhugh]

Hi guys,

Hope you are all well.

I'm at the end of my wits here - for about three months I have been alerting Google via their spam reporting tool about a competitors website (actually group of them) in a reasonably niche market.

This guy has over 20 domains - all of the same topic and sharing the same content - interlinked with each other. Each page contains misleading and repeated words at the bottom of the page, link overkill in the same area at the bottom of the page, and the general look and feel of each site is totally the same. He is clearly interlinking sites to improve pagerank and it's working.

However, when Google refers users to his sites, the landing pages are completely useless, and unnavigable to end users due to the repeated words/links/etc.

I even asked Matt Cutts via his blog some months ago about whether the tool works or not and he said I had a better chance submitting a spam report once logged into the Webmaster Tools area of Google. I've done this - several times over the course of a few months - and absolutely nothing has changed.

Altavista, Yahoo, and other search engines have recognised that these sites are spammy as hell and none of these sites rank highly in their search results.

Anyone else had these problems - c'mon Google, whats going on?

[tedster]

I think the answer is that Google does care about your input about spam -- but they don't promise any specific action. In particular, their preference is not to fix spam domains by hand (like emptying the ocean with a bucket) but to tweak their algorithm to catch more examples of that TYPE of spam.

In my experience, if the spam team feel something reported is quite egregious, you will see it change in a few days to maybe a few weeks. See this thread: Thank you Google! spam reports working! [webmasterworld.com].)

So if nothing has changed in 3 months of reporting, I would assume that the spam team hopes to handle it through the algorithm, whenever that's workable for them. The case you describe, with a relatively unsuable landing page, probably makes your site look good by comparison.