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For many months it seemed Google did not take action when deemed appropriate, which had many of us feeling dissatisfied and confused about proper SEO v/s spammers.
Has this changed any or have things remained the same at Google?
In my experience, Google has yet to follow-up on my spam reports.
Thanks in advance.
Nick
If Google doesn't consider this spam than everyone should use this technique.
Dear BRETT TABKE, I can confirm that Spam-Reports are ignored by the Google-Team, or even worse, that those people CAN NOT SEE, by lack of website-building technique, the system that is used to hide text and links
The Spam-Reports are Absolutely not efficient!
The Google filters for hidden text and hidden URLs even don't work at all.
On several occasions I have submitted a spam-report for a group of sites (about 60 websites) that have about 6,000 pages in top-positions.
These pages all have the same hidden-block in a <div></div>
that contains links to all the other sites.
They also have blocks-of-text of about 3 to 6Kb with hundreds of hidden Keywords, that are positioned in a <div></div> out of screen-reach (position -2000) not even sentences, but: good widget, red widget, another widget, widget world....etc.
Checking their site with link:theirsite.com then all those hidden links show up and are giving them a huge boost in page rank. I checked this out and really all those hidden links are taken in account even the link is not visible on the page!
Don't even talk to me about a naximum of 100-URLs on a page, as some of these pages contain over 200 links and are Top-Ranked with all links taken up by Google and even Fresh-Spidered by Google on a daily-base
Searching for the Keywords: "widget agent", they rank as number 6 of about 227,000 results returned by Google.
But the Keywords "widget agent" is no-where to be found in the visible area of their page.
The Keywords:"widget agent" is ONLY found 23-times in the hidden out-of-screen positioned <div></div> block.
This has been going on for several-years and these sites are just climbing and clinbing in page-rank and showing up higher and higher in the search-results.
Several Spam-Reports from my-self and other-webmasters to Google just don't give any results.
And by the way, these sites don't even sell "widgets" but "somethong else". They just use all the "widget" keywords because these are the most used search-words currently!
The only way that Spam could be avoided on Google is setting up a volunteer-team of webmasters that check all the incoming Spam-reports.
Many-Times, those pages are so-well constructed, that just doing a Source-view, returns the page as normal and without Spam. it is only by downloading the page together with the Style-Sheet and the JS-file(Javascript) that the spam can be seen.
Maybe, that's why many Spam-Reports are ignored by Google, as they simply don't have the time to investigate properly every Spam-submitted page.
Another problem is they are not specialy working in the "widget" field and they don't smell that some thing is wrong with a certain page in a certain "widget" area.
I am into "widgets" and I will smell that something is wrong with a search result or some pages concerning "red widgets" or "green widgets". A webmaster that is into "apples" will smell that something is wrong with a page or a search-result about "green apples" or "red apples". I am not intp "apples" so I will not smell the Spam on pages concerning "apples", but "widgets", I will smell it
I have a list of many pages that are Top-Ranked, but pure-spam without any content. But I stopped sending Spam-Reports as it is completely useless and a waste of my time to download and anylyze the suspected page.
Best Regards,
I never report competitors.
I just report horrible spam pages that reduce the quality of my searches.
Speculation:
Maybe Google gives more attention to reports coming from users that haven't any "business advantage" to eliminate a page from SERPs.
I think they have the technology to achieve this result, their cookie can tell them many interesting things about my interests.
Just a thought.
Spam reports should have nothing to do with "business advantage" or eliminating a certain web-site from the SERPs.
It should have everything todo with have good SERPs
ANY PAGE that does not deliver what it's TITLE and PAGE-CONFIGURATION delivers is a SPAM-PAGE, no matter if it is in the business sector or not!
Webmasters seem to have forgotten to build content and concentrate all their time in building good-ranking pages with KEYWORDS that have nothing todo with the real content of their site.
If someone uses Google to find "widgets", the meaning is he is searching for relevant information on "widgets".
What use to the searcher and the whole web-community that the first 50 or 100 pages that come up in the SERPs for "widgets" are just some pages spam-using the keyword "widgets" to sell "snippets".
If I want "snippets" I will search for "snippets", not for "widgets"
Regards,
This competitor uses different sub-domains, they name the page title as the keyword phrase they are targeting, they provide no content and have hidden text and links all over their pages. I would approximate them to have over 10,000 pages like this indexed. Clearly spamming works very good for them.
I have filled out the Google spam report several times over the last 2 months and have seen no results.
Will Google do anything about this? Lets wait and see.
I've had customers complain about 'spam' often enough. Usually, the complaint boils down to a competitor beating them for something. I've had plenty of Stickymails about spam, same pattern.
Imagine that Google acted on spam reports, rather than just using spam reports as a hint to go and look into a suspected spam case.
Eek, that's a truly horrible thought.
Spam on!
Then they would have to come up with new algorithms to battle it. Beating the doorway spammers is not hard by the way, do a bit work yourself first.
Perhaps the Google people just thinks your competitors site is better than yours, even though they used doorways. After all, it's all about providing the BEST results. Not giving traffic to everyone.
I tried reporting spammers for a while, but really. It's better to just beat them.
Nothing has been done. In fact the three sites now rank higher than when I first reported this situation.
I do know that G does not want to manually remove sites and prefers to adjust the algo to catch spam. It is clear to me that G's algo is incapable of catching duplicate content.
So overall, I feel that the spam reporting mechanism is a complete waste of time.
what a shame
The Google filters for hidden text and hidden URLs even don't work at all.
That's because they don't exist except for the carbon-based ones ;)
Beating the doorway spammers is not hard by the way, do a bit work yourself first.
Doorways, dupe content, hidden text, & link farms can all eventually be beaten by ethical means: patience, time, money, & brainpower--same tools the spammers use.
Frankly no sensible person who knows anything about it would say that.
Unfortunately for some people they don't understand what is involved.
Also unfortunately for some people they don't understand that the answer is sometimes "no".
The reason that I think I got a good response has to do with three things:
1. A very precise spam report. I detailed the problem and how to find it, step by step. And there were very few steps.
2. The blatant and serious nature of the spam. I got to check over half the boxes on the spam form.
3. They were spamming what were fairly clean SERPs. Drug dealers in front of a church will bring in the cops a lot faster than drug deals near the rail yard.
Report spam if you want to, or ignore it if you want. Just don't obsess on it.
"so basically....spam reporting is a waste of time as is the consensus of this poll"Frankly no sensible person who knows anything about it would say that.
I think sensible people have said and are saying just that.
Unfortunately for some people they don't understand what is involved.
Let's lay it out then, for those who don't understand.
Google can't have more than a handful of people dealing with spam reports, effectively attempting to police 3.3+ billion pages or at least respond to complaints on them. The size of the problem demands that the bulk of the work be done in an automated manner, yet no automated mechanism seems nearly adequate. Its a bit of a paradox.
I won't attempt to understate the problem, nor can I offer any legitimate reasons why some blatant spammers are promptly dealt with as a result of a spam report while others are given the proverbial green light.
Ohhhh, did you remember to mention GoogleGuy and your WW nick? Well, didja?!?!?
Be a good little googler and follow our rules [google.com], and let us know when someone breaks them. Your reports will be sent to Mr.
> dev/null
GoogleGuy: Could you move faster to improve your hidden text filter?
Maybe if you switched it with your spam report filter...
newsphinx:
> GoogleGuy: Could you move faster to improve your hidden text filter?
Let's hope that Google doesn't move too fast, else the collateral damage would be high.
If a site is really slick by appearing to offer something for sale but really never intended to sell anything, existing solely for clicks they were not removed. I suppose click farms are really difficult to filter and maybe not even a target of the spam filter.
If the spammers were extremely blatant they were removed. Lots of hidden text...
I see a lot of simple (no-scroll, hidden div's etc.) blatent hidden text spammers out there still - makes me wonder if there's an algo-filter yet for hidden text.
The best thing is that we're beating them using legal-tactics, and it feels great seeing them below us with their spammy title tags and the fact that when you click to their page the content doesn't reflect the SERP description (description coming from text below the no-scroll, for example) only makes them look worse (tho it does lower the serp quality).
Though this is only the case for hidden text, it feels better than a spam report, and in fact it makes us look better.
Well, I can confirm that they ARE looked at and attended too. I sent in a report about a month ago for a common search that was returning highly inappropriate adult content and it was taken care of in four hours.
90% of the general webmaster populace is confused and misguided about what Google considers spam.
One of my all time favorite WebmasterWorld quotes:
If you are getting beat by hidden text and doorway pages - you really suck at optimization. -Chris_R
I do know the algo misses much regarding hiddent text, but I will say, again, when I have reported gross amounts of hidden text and of topic stuff... Google has responded quickly and removed them.
