Well, it depends, and Cutts explains why.

“This is a tricky question because on the one hand there’s algorithmic spam, and then there’s manual spam, and all manual spam does have an eventual time out, so if you were to completely clean up all the content on the domain, [and] do a reconsideration request, in theory, that domain can recover,” says Cutts. “However, on the algorithmic side, if there are a ton of spammy links that the previous owner built up, that can be a little bit hard to go through, and try to clean up and get all those links taken down, and make a list of all those links.”

He continues, “The way to think about it is, there are a lot of spammers out there that do basically what’s known as a ‘churn and burn’ tactic, where they just use as many techniques to try and make a domain rank as they can, and then as soon as that domain is awful or bad, or Google has caught it, then they sort of movie on, and they go on to some other exploit, and they try to tackle it with another domain. Now what you don’t want to do is be the guy who gets caught left holding the bag.”

Long story short: how bad do you really want this domain?

“The system of paying to message non-friends in their inbox is designed to prevent spam while acknowledging that sometimes you might want to hear from people outside your immediate social circle,” said Facebook in a statement.

This is an expansion on a months-old test that first originated in the U.S. back in December of 2012. Facebook began to test the “paid messages,” which allow users to pay a small fee to ensure that the messages they send reach the intended recipient’s inbox.

Note it’s their inbox that we’re shooting for – not the “other” folder. That’s Facebook’s version of a spam folder, and it houses messages deemed spammy or unimportant, based on a sorting algorithm.

The Telegraph reports that U.K. users are seeing a sliding pay scale for celebrities that quotes a message price based on their number of followers and message competition.

“We are testing a number of price points in the UK and other countries to establish the optimal fee that signals importance. Part of that test involves charging higher amounts for public figures, based on the number of followers they have. This is still a test and these prices are not set in stone,” said Facebook.

It’s likely that any message a random Facebook user sends to a celebrity with millions of followers or even someone that they simply don’t know and is way outside their network will be relegated to the “other” messages folder. With this test, Facebook is giving users a way to make sure that these messages reach the main inbox.

Although it could be seen as Facebook giving people a way to pay to spam you, Facebook has always said that it’s about reducing spam.

“Several commentators and researchers have noted that imposing a financial cost on the sender may be the most effective way to discourage unwanted messages and facilitate delivery of messages that are relevant and useful,” said Facebook when they first launched the test.

Last week, Google put out a blog post claiming to have substantially reduced the amount of compromised accounts. The company said hit has reduced the number by 99.7% since 2011.

Google security engineer Mike Hearn wrote:

Every time you sign in to Google, whether via your web browser once a month or an email program that checks for new mail every five minutes, our system performs a complex risk analysis to determine how likely it is that the sign-in really comes from you. In fact, there are more than 120 variables that can factor into how a decision is made.

If a sign-in is deemed suspicious or risky for some reason—maybe it’s coming from a country oceans away from your last sign-in—we ask some simple questions about your account. For example, we may ask for the phone number associated with your account, or for the answer to your security question. These questions are normally hard for a hijacker to solve, but are easy for the real owner. Using security measures like these, we’ve dramatically reduced the number of compromised accounts by 99.7 percent since the peak of these hijacking attempts in 2011.

According to Virus Bulletin this “could be the case,” but “Yahoo!, and to a lesser extent Hotmail (now Outlook.com), has a real problem.”

Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted a link to the report, calling it “some external validation that Google has radically reduced email spam from hijacked Gmail accounts”.

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Matt Cutts
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Some external validation that Google has radically reduced email spam from hijacked Gmail accounts: http://t.co/S1fqM1F3pe

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The report itself says:

The legitimate feeds we use do receive the occasional spam email – usually from compromised accounts and typically sent to addresses contained in the compromised accounts’ address books. We have noticed a few emails from compromised Gmail accounts among these spam emails, but noticed that Yahoo! emails are far more prevalent. We were initially hesitant to draw conclusions from this: it is well possible that the feeds we receive are skewed towards certain email providers.

Indeed, they are skewed, but towards Gmail, whose messages are far more prevalent among the legitimate feeds. This makes the situation a lot worse for Yahoo!: over the last eight months of testing we have found that, in the legitimate email feeds, about one in 115 emails from the Sunnyvale-based company were spam, compared with fewer than one in 4,800 from Gmail. Hotmail, Microsoft’s free webmail service (now Outlook.com), isn’t doing particularly well either, with almost 1 in 325 emails being spam.

Not good news for Yahoo, which recently revamped its email service, and is currently facing a lot of user complaints about a homepage redesign. Nor is it great news for Microsoft who is heavily campaigning for Gmail users to switch to Outlook.com based on the notion that Google is somehow violating their privacy by algorithmically serving them ads as it has for nearly a decade.

You’ve been sending us various kinds of messages via WMT to improve transparency. It’s a good move. How many types of messages do you send now? And how do you decide what message you send?

“At this point we do send hundreds of thousands of messages each month,” says Cutts. “That might sound like a lot, but for example, one search engine named blekko estimated that a million spam pages are created every hour. The web is very large, so we shouldn’t be surprised that some percentage of it is spam, and as a result, we do spend a lot of time finding that spam, and since we automatically send messages and notifications when we find it, there are a lot – hundreds of thousands of notifications we send out each month.”

Cutts notes that there’s a lot of different categories of spam covered in Google’s webmaster guidelines, but that they all lead to about ten different kinds of messages that Google sends. Hidden text, keyword stuffing, etc. would all go into one kind of message.

He then goes on to share some stats from “earlier this year,” as he says, indicating that they’re from January and February. It’s not entirely clear when this video was made. Since it’s still early in February, we’re not sure if the video was recorded before the New Year or not. Cutts does tend to film a bunch of these videos at a time. Either way, it probably makes little difference if they’re putting the video out now.

“Out of the hundreds of thousands of messages that we sent over that time period, roughly 90% of those were for what we call ‘black hat’,” says Cutts. “That’s pure egregious spam (clear cut), so anybody sufficiently tech savvy would probably be able to recognize that it’s spam. It’s the stuff that you think of as traditional junk that you just don’t want to show up in your results because it is very clearly spam.”

“About four percent of the messages were because the content had little or no added value, and so it’s not ranking as highly in our search results,” he continues. “About three percent of the messages that we sent were related to hacking, so hacking is a big attack as far as black hats, and even though it’s illegal, there’s a lot of people that do that, trying to promote their pharmacy pills or whatever…that sort of thing. Something like two percent of the messages that we sent out were related to link buying, and about one percent were related to link selling. So overall, between two and three precent related to links and link spam overall – about buying and selling links.”

He leaves it at that.

Earlier this week, Google put out a video of Cutts explaining how to figure out which links to remove if you got an unnatural link warning.

Hoax-Slayer first spotted the hoax. Here’s the message that some users are seeing:

It’s official. Communication media. FACEBOOK has just published its price. fee of $? ($ 9.99), to become a member of “gold” and keep your privacy as it is. If you paste this on your wall will be completely free. Otherwise, tomorrow all your documents can become public. Even those messages that you have deleted or photos that you have not authorized …… not cost you anything, copy and paste

Of course, there’s the part at the end about simply sharing the status in order to make all the problems go away. That’s the number one mechanism that scammers use to spread viral hoaxes on any social network – because how hard is it to just copy and paste it, you know, just in case?

In reality, this hoax isn’t exactly new. It’s a mashup of a couple different hoaxes that have been floating around for years. First, there’s the Facebook “Gold” scam. Hoaxes suggesting that Facebook will soon make people pay to use the service have been going around for years, and the particular one involving a $9.99 Gold membership was spotted as early as 2010.

This has the added bonus of a privacy scare, suggesting that users must pay or share a status in order to avoid public humiliation. Privacy on Facebook is a scary subject for many users, so this simply plays into some people’s base fears.

Another Facebook hoax currently making the rounds implies that users could be lock up in “Facebook Jail” if they send too many friend requests that get rejected. There is a tiny bit of truth to this hoax, in that Facebook will temporarily suspend your friend-requesting abilities if you send out too many unfulfilled requests. But the hoax suggests that this could lead to a sudden and irreversible termination of your whole account, which is simply untrue.

As always, if it sounds ridiculous, it is ridiculous. Facebook is never going to make you pay to use the service and they are never going to make all of your private information public – at least not on their terms.

“I wanted to clarify a quick point: when people search for a phone number and land on a page like the one below, it’s not really useful and a bad user experience. Also, we do consider it to be keyword stuffing to put so many phone numbers on a page,” he said. “There are a few websites that provide value-add for some phone numbers, e.g. sites that let people discuss a specific phone number that keeps calling them over and over. But if a site stuffs a large number of numbers on its pages without substantial value-add, that can violate our guidelines, not to mention annoy users.”

This is the image he was referring to:

Today, Google released its latest Webmaster Help video, which features Cutts talking about the subject once again. It’s short and sweet, and basically serves as a reminder that Google will take action on this kind of thing:

The user-submitted question is:

Why does a certain YouTube video appear to be visiting my blogspot blog? Take this video for example, it keeps appearing in my Blogger Dashboard as a referral..

Cutts says they looked at the video, and found in the comments that there were multiple people complaining about the same problem – that the video spammed their blog.

“This is an instance of what we call referer spam,” he says. “A referer is just a simple HTTP header that is passed along when a browser goes from one page to another page, and it normally is used to indicate where the user’s coming from. Now, people can use that, and change the referer to be anything that they want. They can make it empty, or there are some people who will set the referer to a page they want to promote, and then they will just visit tons of pages around the web. All the people that look at the referers see that, and say, ‘Oh, maybe I should go and check that out.’ And the link – whenever there’s a referer – it doesn’t mean that there was necessarily a link, because you can make that referer anything you want, so there are some people who try to drive traffic by visiting a ton of websites, even with an automated script, and setting the referer to be the URL that they want to promote.”

He notes that some of the other comments on the YouTube video say that its creator is well known, and has no reason to spam people. Cutts notes that it doesn’t necessarily have to be coming from the actual creator.

“The thing to know is that there’s no authentication with referer. Anybody can make a browser, and set the referer,” he says. “You can’t automatically assume it was the owner of that URL if you see something showing up in your dashboard.”

Basically, you should just ignore it, he says.

Kaspersky Lab has a new chart detailing something that we should all be thrilled to see: we’re winning the fight against spam. Better technology, better filters, and a more informed population is helping to eradicate spam messages from inboxes all over the globe.

In 2008, spam accounted for over 90% of all email traffic, worldwide. Just think about that for a second. That’s a lot of spam. Since then, spam has been on the decline (with some exceptions). The spam share has really started to plummet since mid-2011, though.

Their latest report from the end of 2012 shows that spam now accounts for 67% of all global email traffic. Two-thirds may still seem like a lot, but it represents a significant decline from what it was just 4 years ago.

Of course, email isn’t the only place that spammers live. The rise of the social web has produced an all new breeding ground for spammers. One recent study suggested that up to 40% of all social media accounts worldwide were created with spamming in mind.

Now, go clean out your spam filter.

[Kaspersky Lab via The Economist]

What about $100? Holy hell I know, right? $100? To simply put your message in a more visible position? Apparently, some users are being given the option to send a message to Mark Zuckerberg’s inbox for that price.

That figure is part of a small test subset that Facebook is running to test their new paid messages feature that they first unveiled to the public back in December. Back then, Facebook launched the paid messages test, which gives users the ability to pay a small fee (at the time $1) to ensure that their messages reach other users’ inboxes – instead of winding up in the “other” messages folder that nobody ever really checks. The “other” folder is pretty much Facebook’s version of an email spam folder.

The paid messages would only become an option when users try to message other users outside their network (friends or friends of friends). Facebook said that it would be a way to cut back on spam, saying:

“Several commentators and researchers have noted that imposing a financial cost on the sender may be the most effective way to discourage unwanted messages and facilitate delivery of messages that are relevant and useful.”

But, it could also be seen as Facebook letting people pay to spam your inbox. And maybe that’s why Facebook is testing a $100 price point to send a single message. “We are testing some extreme price points to see what works to filter spam,” Facebook told Mashable, who first spotted the extreme test.

It’s unlikely that Facebook would rollout $100 messaging options globally; this is clearly what they said it is – and extreme test. But it’s interesting to see what the company is doing to test the spam-blasting capabilities of the new product.

Both of these improvements were warmly received. Other “improvements,” such as that creepy “message seen” feature, were considerably less-appreciated. Either way, Facebook is trying, you have to give them that.

I’m not sure this latest test is going to help their cause.

Facebook is testing (note, testing) a product that will give users the ability to pay to ensure messages sent to other users outside their network reach that users’ inbox, and not wind up in that “other” folder (Facebook’s version of a spam folder). That means you can pay a small fee ($1) to bypass Facebook’s messages sorting algorithms and place your message in the inbox of someone you don’t know.

“Several commentators and researchers have noted that imposing a financial cost on the sender may be the most effective way to discourage unwanted messages and facilitate delivery of messages that are relevant and useful,” says Facebook.

It could also be seen as Facebook letting people pay to spam you.

But Facebook said it could come in handy if you wanted to reach out to a potential employer, let’s say, who wasn’t your friend and who wasn’t even in your network of friends. That’s a good point, but it’s unclear just how willing a users would be to pay to make sure someone simply sees their message in their inbox. I guess it would be the same population that would pay to promote their own post.

Of couse, this is just a test. Facebook does tons of tests all the time, and most of them never see primetime. But then again, they usually don’t announce these tests in blog posts.

The pay-to-message test isn’t the only announcement coming out of Facebook today. They’ve also added new filtering options to Messages. First, “Basic Filtering,” which is pretty much the same as the previous “friends of friends” setting. Most of the message you’ll see will come from your friends and people you may know.

Second, “Strict Filtering” simply allows for messages from friends to hit your inbox.

Facebook does say that some new types of messages may appear in your inbox that wouldn’t before today:

With filters, the following types of messages may reach your Inbox that before would not:

Someone using Messenger for Android, who is not on Facebook but has your contact info in their phone, wanted to send you a message; A friend of a friend wanted to include you in a message about a party along with some of your mutual friends; A friend wanted to send a message to your @facebook.com address.

But it’s these paid messages that I’m sure most users will be talking about. Facebook says that they will “continue to iterate and evolve Facebook Messages over the coming months.”