Timeframe for clearing UGC spam to avoid getting banned?

[Future]

Is there any specific timeframe to clear off spam from a site before it gets penalized or caught by google?
Spam in form of comments, links to banned site, malware, etc. ?

Its almost impossible to 100% control spam on a site which enables user-generated content atleast in form of comments.. though we keep a manual watch/check, it takes a few to many hours to clear everything sometimes.

edit: Specially in case of holidays which can last to few days


Thanks.

[tedster]

I don't know that there's any specific time frame for clearing UGC spam, but it does seem that Google is quite lenient - if they already indexed a non-spam initial version of the URL. They can recognize that pages include UGC.

Are you letting your UGC links all stay dofollow and not nofollow?

[Future]

all UGC links are dofollow (though we take utmost care to clean junk under 24 hours)

[networkliquidators]

Why not require admin approval for comments? Works for most sites, but if you get 1000s of comments a day, its probably not practical.

[goodroi]

I would not want google to ever see my website after a spammer submits 1000 ugc comments linking to malware sites and the links are dofollow. I do not think there is any timeframe. I think the questions is more about to avoid finding yourself in that situation.

You can be selective about which comments require admin approval and which don't. For example it is easy to only hold comments from new (aka untested) members. Also you can have all comments with 1 or more links to go into a review bin. You can also create a blacklist of keywords and domains that have caused trouble in the past. There are many solutions. That should greatly minimize your exposure.

If you do find yourself already exposed, then clean it up ASAP. Google is crawling webpages all the time. You never know when they will crawl your page again and you definitely dont want them to find bad links when they do.

[Future]

Thank You for your comments,
According to this [google.com...] (Many blogging software packages automatically nofollow user comments, but those that don't can most likely be manually edited to do this.) google does allows websites to manually edit comment SPAM
Inspite we fight comment spam manually we were keen on understanding time requirements to clear the same.

[jimbeetle]

google does allows websites to manually edit comment SPAM

The sentence before is saying that you can manually edit the code of the software package to add nofollow to user-generated links.

And it goes without saying that Google can't allow you or disallow you to manually review and edit comments.

One sentence you left out from that paragraph:

If you're willing to vouch for links added
by third parties (e.g. if a commenter is trusted on your site), then
there's no need to use nofollow on links; however, linking to sites
that Google considers spammy can affect the reputation of your
own site.

Bold in original.

That "many hours to clear everything sometimes" is very problematic so I'd follow goodroi's advice. Some packages have a few of his suggestions baked in, others have plugins.

[Future]

Thank You for clarifying my doubts and over-reading. This was very helpful.