What is Google doing with dofollow spam comments?

[brinked]

I have seen it time and time again. Crappy, no value websites entering the top ten for competitive search terms solely from buying a bunch of do follow comment links.

Granted, these sites tend to only rank high for a few months and then drop, there has to be a better way to control this.

One example. There is a site ranking top 3 for 3 similar VERY competitive search terms. All of their links are from comment spam. These pages also have a bunch of other comment spam links for casinos, viagra you name it. Yet the same still holds its PR and allows these sites to rank because of it.

This one particular site doesn't seem to even have any other links besides these blog comments. Not to mention that most of these blogs are not even US based and the site itself doesnt even work!

Google has so many detections and trip wires in place, you would think something like this would be easy to prevent.

Another thing I see a lot is a site ranking from a bunch of hidden links. I know I would be able to code something myself that can detect a hidden link on a page, why cant google?

Hopefully these are things that will be fixed sooner than later.

It just saddens me that my clients work so hard to get high quality relevant links from networking, communicating etc and then some site that has no business outranking them does.

I always tell them though they are in this for the long run and these sites will come and go meanwhile their site will always be remain steady because of quality.

[tedster]

You're giving your clients solid advice. Google's desire to keep the SERPs really fresh also makes them vulnerable, in the short term, to this kind of webspam. I don't know how they will be countering it, but I'll bet the new spam reporting tool [webmasterworld.com] in Chrome is part of their game plan.

[brinked]

the chrome tool is useful. But it's just a convenience tool. It make it easier to report spam which I never really found too hard to begin with.

I don't want to encourage my clients to spam report their competitors because I do not know where that might lead.

I am always in the best interests of my clients, so if these few sites do not get penalized soon, I may have to go in and report about 150+ websites with hidden links.

I dont know about reporting a site that has a lot of dofollow spam comments, does google want people to report this? I dont really see a relative option for it.

[micklearn]

@brinked - Tough call, if you or your clients are going to report anyone, make sure that all of the sites you may own or work on are spot free and top notch in their field. And, make sure to be nice when you are typing out the spam reports/submissions.

[brinked]

mick, why would that be?

I dont feel I need to be nice to google for doing their job for them. I would be pointing out a site that violates their TOS and therefore improving the quality of googles search results. When I fill out a spam report, I make it as short and to the point as possible.

My clients have nothing to worry about, even if they did, if we report a competitor, there is no way for them to find out who reported them or even if it was someone who reported them at all.

[martinibuster]

My clients have nothing to worry about...if we report a competitor, there is no way for them to find out who reported them

It's not the competitors you should worry about. Reporting a competitor might bring scrutiny on the entire top ten. If your client is in the top ten then it might get caught in a bit of housecleaning. You would be surprised at how strict a manual review is over what the algo normally allows sites to get away with.

As far as being nice, it's not like you are doing this because your soul bleeds for Google. You're client is getting something out of it, too, right?

[brinked]

haha ok, we got a little off from my original post.

I never report any competitors unless they really warrant it such as hidden links, blatant spam etc.

My original post is about some websites buying bulk comment spam/hidden links. So I said I will report these websites who link to said competitor, not the actual competitor.

As far as being nice to google, I have never been friendly when filing my spam reports. I have been doing it for years and I get over 90% results. More often than not, reported page gets PR removed until it removes the links.

I have never been friendly in my reports and nor do I ever intend to. Their spam team has a lot of reports to sort through on a daily basis, I know if I were them, I would not want to read any additional useless text that I did not have to. Being friendly to them should not sway them in my favor, if it does, they should be fired for not doing their job properly.

[brinked]

just to give everyone an update. I have reported over 150 websites that have hidden text. These were all on inner pages and most had pagerank. I will post here when and if I see that google has taken any measures which I am confident that they will.

[scottsonline]

Everyone says they don't report but many do. I half think google releases filters from time to time to get our backs up and report spam. When a mass of reports comes in they digest the data and use it going forward.

[brinked]

scotts, of course they do. Its a dog eat dog world. The competitors would do the same.

If a website has no business ranking where its ranking, and its hurting your business, and google is asking you to report spam/hidden links etc then why not?

[micklearn]

mick, why would that be?

See martinibuster's comment below...I've been there. I wasn't doing anything wrong yet the end result wasn't favorable. I just felt that my tone may have aggravated someone, regardless of my intentions.

If your client is in the top ten then it might get caught in a bit of housecleaning.

As far as being nice, it's not like you are doing this because your soul bleeds for Google. You're client is getting something out of it, too, right?

That's exactly what I think goes through the mind of the person(s) who review the reports. I guess I should have written, be nice, and *not* degrading with any reporting of spammy stuff.

[brinked]

So long as you are reporting legitimate spam such as blatant hidden links, I doubt there is any reason to be concerned.

These spam reports are important for google. It helps them to continue to improve their results when they notice trends of spam.

Lets be real here, who is going to report a website? A competitor is going to and thats what google expects. Do you even think any average user out there can spot a hidden link? And if they did, would they even bother to report it?

The average user does not look for these things, if a site is spammy to them they just move on, and I would bet that over 95% of non webmaster, search engine users dont even know that there is a medium to report a spammy site to google.

[micklearn]

I would bet that over 95% of non webmaster, search engine users dont even know that there is a medium to report a spammy site to google.

I completely agree here (with an even higher percentage). Somewhere I seem to remember reading that G didn't receive that many complaints about spam in the SERP's.

Just curious, should/shouldn't that be considered a fault of G/all search engines? The links to report something aren't very obvious. There's no real push to enable the every day searcher to identify sites that don't meet expectations.

[brinked]

Thats because google clearly does not promote the spam report to the average searcher.

Where can you find out about the spam report tool?

- google.com/webmasters

- google.com blog, discussion forums etc which is for webmasters

- webmaster / SEO type sites

- mattcutts blog/twitter/youtube videos etc

It is very clear they are targeting webmasters only and they are relying on webmasters to rat out their competition.

Now granted...google does have a feedback link on the bottom if a user does not like the search results, but I doubt many people use that either...probably competitors posing as a regular surfer.