Google Takes Action on 65% of Manual Spam Reports

Google recently announced at the SMX trade show, which is one of the biggest expos in the SEO and SEM business, that out of the 35,000 manual reports it receives monthly, it takes action on 65% of them.

Google’s Juan Felipe Rincon, who is the Webmaster Outreach Manager for Google, talked about the program during his keynote. He said that the company gets about 7 million bits of spam report a month. And of that, 35,000 of them are user-generated reports. And of that 35,000, the company deals with 65% of them.

While that seems a bit low, he explains the reasoning behind the number. The majority of the ones they do not take action on are not spam at all, but false flags. 80% of all manual reports are spam, while 20% are not.

Rincon also noted that they try to prioritize spam reports based on the user impact. They know that some users are better than others at finding spam and do a great job of reporting them. Those users are rewarded with priority when they go through the reports manually.

How to Manually Report Spam

According to Google’s Inside Search web page, spam sites come in all shapes and sizes. They use a variety of techniques such as spamming keywords, buying links that pass PageRank, and putting some invisible text on the screen. Although algorithms are in place to catch this kind of falsification, sometimes it is up to the users to manually report them.

Anyone who spots a spam page can go to the webmaster console on the Google website by clicking here. From there, they can choose from options such as “paid links”, “Copyright issues” and other types of Webspam. After that, the user is prompted to post the link for the website and to add any details they might have.

Google’s Mission of Quality Searches

Google has positioned itself as the worldwide search leader over the last decade thanks to its commitment to keeping content of note at the forefront of its search engine. In the infancy of SEO all those years ago, companies would use several techniques like keyword stuffing and other spam tactics to maintain an edge. However, the Google algorithms have gotten very sophisticated, and combining that with manual reports means that only companies who stay on top of the latest breakthroughs will continue to meet success.