Side note: It’s worth pointing out that he used Twitter to announce this. I see no updates about it in his posts on Google+. This is the kind of thing that makes Twitter essential to Google’s realtime search feature, and why Google+ has a long way to go before it can serve as a useful replacement for it. Even Googlers are still relaying important information via Twitter. It looks like he hasn’t posted to Google Buzz since May 28, either, btw. But that’s another story.

Here’s what the new spam report form looks like:

The page says, “‘Webspam’ refers to pages that try to trick Google into ranking them highly. Before you file a webspam report, see if the page might have a different problem.” Users are then presented with options for:

• Paid Links (the page is selling or buying link)
• Objectionable content (the page is inappropriate)
• Malware (the page is infected)
• Other Google products (This page abuses Google products other than Search, e.g., AdSense, Google Maps, etc.)
• Copyright and other legal issues (This page should be removed under applicable law).
• Personal/private (This page discloses private information)
• Phishing (This page is trying to get sensitive information)
• Something else is wrong (This page has other, non-webspam related issues)
• And finally an option that says “This page is really webspam. Report webspam”

Each option will take you to a different form or information source about how to proceed from there.

Google’s approach seems to have ruffled at least one feather. “Marketing Guy” Scott Boyd talks about the new form, saying:

Let’s see. Google crushes legitimate business websites in an attempt to remove spam from the index. Google crushes competition by undercutting them left, right and centre (analytics market is pretty much stagnent and frankly Adense just promotes lazy webmasters who’d rather take some easy bucks than work at their business). Oh and is quite happy to take vast amounts of our information without mentioning how valuable it actually is too loudly

I think not.

Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting recently posted an interview with Tiffany Oberoi, an engineer on Google’s Search Quality team. Cutts said, “Every SEO/search person should read” it. She talks about how reconsideration requests work.

Now that Google has refreshed its spam reporting, I’m guessing we’re going to see a whole lot more reporting, and of course a whole lot more of such requests. Here are some key quotes from Oberoi from that interview:

“We do have a few different manual actions that we can take, depending on the type of spam violation. We would tend to handle a good site with one bad element differently from egregious webspam. For example, a site with obvious blackhat techniques might be removed completely from our index, while a site with less severe violations of our quality guidelines might just be demoted. Instead of doing a brand name search, I’d suggest a site: query on the domain as a sure way to tell if the site is in our index. But remember that there can be many other reasons for a site not being indexed, so not showing up isn’t an indication of a webspam issue.”

“If a site is affected by an algorithmic change, submitting a reconsideration request will not have an impact. However, webmasters don’t generally know if it’s an algorithmic or manual action, so the most important thing is to clean up the spam violation and submit a reconsideration request to be sure. As we crawl and reindex the web, our spam classifiers reevaluate sites that have changed. Typically, some time after a spam site has been cleaned up, an algorithm will reprocess the site (even without a reconsideration request) and it would no longer be flagged as spam.”

She goes on to point out that reconsideration requests will not help you if you’ve been impacted by the Google Panda update.

"We did see a big surge in traffic following our announcement that we banned the top 20 content farms," he says. "We’ve had a lot of positive reaction to that from web users who are tired of seeing poor quality content in their search results."  

"These new users are glad we’ve taken a stand and are checking the site out," he adds. "I don’t have stats yet on how many new slashtags they may have made yet, though."

Blekko issued a metrics release today, looking at how many slashtags have been created since launch, as well as total search queries in January – an all time high. Blekko users have created over 110,000 slashtags since the company’s November launch, and the search engine saw over 30 million search queries on the site in January with user activity for the month averaging between 10 to 15 queries per second. While Blekko saw a small dip in queries after an all time high at launch, current search levels are now greater than the initial launch pop, the company says. 

"We’re happy at how quickly users have adopted the idea of a new search engine and have created so many quality slashtags just three months since launch," Skrenta said. "Our call to rid the Web of spam has been heard loud and clear by many and we encourage our community to continue to slash the spam." 

Below are a couple of recent interviews we did with Skrenta on webspam and Blekko:

More WebProNews Videos

More WebProNews Videos

As Skrenta was on the panel with Google’s Matt Cutts and Bing’s Harry Shum last week, in which those two argued about the whole Bing-copying-search-results debate, we asked Skrenta for his take on the matter, but he wouldn’t comment on that. 

As DuckDuckGo has started hard wiring in wikiHow content as its top results for how-to queries, we asked if Blekko would ever consider such a move and whether Blekko had been approached by wikiHow. His response was simply, "We haven’t been approached by wikiHow." 

Blekko does say that it will add to its list of 20 blocked sites as necessary.

Blekko announced this morning that it has banned eHow and other content farms from its results. See the full list here. Watch our recent interview with Skrenta about webspam here. 

Cutts was quick to extend some praise to Blekko, saying they "made a great domain," and that he appreciates that they’ve done some interesting things lately, mentioning the spam clock, for example. He quickly followed that up by saying, "The fact is that we do use algorithms and that’s our first instinct, but when we see manual spam, we are willing to remove it manually."

He added that within Google, they could say certain domain names are webspam, but they’re trying to do things algorithmically. "We have a lot more projects that we’re working on," he added, appearing to suggest that Google’s not done with its content farm cleanup process – at least that’s how I interpreted it (something I suggested in a recent article). 

Cutts said that when Google finds spam with its manual team, it also ejects it from Adsense, and that people tend to put the blame on AdSense, but even if that disappeared, we’d still have spam. 

When asked what incentive Google would have to remove content from AdSense-driven pages that drive billions of dollars for the company, he just said that Google has always taken the philosophy that they care more about the long-time loyalty of users. 

Then Demand Media was specifically brought up (as it has been by inquiring minds in other instances), but there was still plenty of vagueness. Cutts’ response was to mention a comment on Hacker News about how Demand Media had five articles on how to tie your shoes, then simply turn it around to "we don’t care if a site is running Google ads…we take action…we want to find an algorithmic solution." 

Meanwhile, plenty of this type of content is still saturating Google SERPs. There are way more than five articles from eHow on fixing scratches in your car’s paint, as illustrated in another article:

Note: He did not say anything to the effect of "we don’t consider eHow a content farm."

Clearly Blekko is less shy about what it considers a content farm (again, see the list linked to above). Skrenta says "there’s more spam than good sites," and that it’s "easier to make a list of the sites that you actually want to go to. He notes that the top fifty medical sites have actual doctors and medical librarians creating and curating content (as opposed to what you might find from a site like eHow). 

The Bing position appears to be to let Google lead the way in how to deal with search quality, which is kind of a fun position given the whole results-copying ordeal. Shum said Matt and Google need to "take this thing very seriously" because they and the industry are looking to the leader to make the web more fair and cleaner. He did say that they were also looking at Blekko and what others are saying about the topic as well. 

Do you agree that Google’s search quality is the best it’s ever been? Share your thoughts.

"Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago, and spam in most other languages is even lower than in English," said Cutts. "However, we have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months, and while we’ve already made progress, we have new efforts underway to continue to improve our search quality."

"As we’ve increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well," explains Cutts. "To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments. We’ve also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010. And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites."

The post was in response to a lot of talk throughout the Blogosphere lately that Google is losing its edge in search – when it comes to relevancy and spam. Some of this was no doubt fueled by the recent launch of the spam clock from Blekko, which may not be on the minds of much of the general public, but that many influential bloggers in the search space are certainly aware of. 

Watch an interview we did the other day with Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta about web spam here:

More WebProNews Videos

Cutts says it is a misconception that Google doesn’t take as strong an action on spam in its index if the spammy sites are Google ads. 

"To be crystal clear," he says, "Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google; Displaying Google ads does not help a site’s rankings in Google; and Buying Google ads does not increase a site’s rankings in Google’s search results. These principles have always applied, but it’s important to affirm they still hold true."

Something tells me Cutts and Google will never convince everybody, but at least they’re being "crystal clear" in their explanation.

Is the explanation clear enough for you? Tell us what you think. 

"About a year and a half ago, I asked for suggestions for webspam projects for 2009," says Cutts. "The feedback that we got was extremely helpful. It’s almost exactly the middle of 2010, so it seemed like a good time to ask again: what projects do you think webspam should work on in 2010 and beyond?"

Cutts is taking suggestions in the comments section of that blog post. From the sound of things, this could really make an impact on Google’s approach, so if you have any good ideas, don’t be shy about sharing them.

Last year Matt got over 300 suggestions, and I’d expect a similar number this time, which is all the more reason to make yours stand out by offering some thoughtful insight.

Cutts does note that he doesn’t want people to call out individual sites or much discussion in the comments – just your idea of what Google should work on to decrease webspam.

UPDATE: Cutts has tallied the demands so far and shares them in a list here.

Original article: Matt Cutts asked on his blog what people wanted to see Google’s webspam team tackle in 2009. Of course, he has gotten a lot of responses (many from SEOs and Internet marketers), and will likely get a lot more. I guess this is the webspam equivalent of Google’s AdWords Wishlist and Google Mobile Product Ideas page, both of which call on users for ideas for improvements.

Some suggestions and responses from people include:

              Matt Cutts

– cloaking

– a paid link reporting firefox plugin

– spam punishment through decreasing PR

– improving local spam

– more info regarding penalties

– eliminating content "pretenders"

– more focus on duplicate sites

– fewer sites requiring logins early in SERPs

– if it’s banned in search, ban it in Adwords and leave room for quality advertisers.

– scraper sites

– block spammers from ALL Google services

– Search Queries – Websites that take you to a search results page or something similar

– paid text links are still very successful after Google has made such a point against them

– There should be a SERP check for MFA sites which have some > zero content

– Google should pay more attention to DMOZ and Google Directory

– product review spam is out of control

– provide a Spam Detection API

– devalue ALL links for sites like, myspace, facebook, etc.

– less top positionswith A LOT of keyword stuffing

– have someone from the spam team LOOK at spam reports from the Google webmaster console and evaluate the site in the report taking MANUAL action

– Team up with Akismet and use their data for who’s spamming who.

– More focus on REAL spam like hacked backlinks, comment spammers, forum spammers etc

– less apparent value allocated to keyword rich domain names

– Shutting down all the splogs on Blogger!

There are plenty more where that came from and they are being added continuously. It is good that Google is giving its users places for feedback. They seem genuinely interested in letting everyone have a voice and potentially listening to that voice (or at least considering it). If you have something in mind that you would like Google’s webspam team to tackle this year, drop by Matt’s post and let him know.

Remember those webspam and paid links reporting options in the Webmaster Help Group?  They’re not black holes.

 The Webmaster Help Group

On the Webmaster Central Blog, Google’s Reid Yokoyama instead reveals, "Over the last year, users have submitted thousands and thousands of paid link reports to Google . . . .  These reports are actively reviewed, and the feedback is invaluable to improve our search algorithms.  We also are willing to take manual action on a significant fraction of paid link reports as we continue to improve our algorithms."

All in all, "[T]he hard work of users who have already reported paid links has helped improve the quality of our index for millions."

A similar story has formed around the topic of webspam, with users’ reports being responsible for at least some of the 450-plus improvements made to Google’s algorithms last year.

It’s too bad the company’s not offering shares of stock or cash in return, but by documenting problems, it looks like you’re making genuine contributions to Google and its search community.

How Do Doorway and Startpages Differ?

The debate begins with the Irish branch of Google’s Search Quality Team and a posting about how to create good startpages, which, says Selina and Jos, have been popular in the Dutch market for some time.

They define a startpage as:

…a webpage with a lot of links about a specific topic. The startpages are hosted on a startpage domain and each separate startpage is maintained by an individual webmaster. The links on startpages are usually ordered by categories related to the topic of the page. Besides hyperlinks, startpages often contain text, animations and pictures.

But hang on a second, says InformationWeek blogger Thomas Claburn in a blog post titled "Is Google’s Spam Fight a Sham?", a title just begging for a response from anti-webspam commander Matt Cutts, who we’ll get to shortly.

"In practice," writes Claburn, "a doorway page looks like…well, a Web page with a lot of links about a specific topic."

And Google has been highly punitive of doorway pages, as they have historically been used for spamdexing the search engine to manipulate search results. Claburn also questions AdSense for Domains, which is the topic of the latest Google lawsuit, labeling the practice of putting ads on parked domains "a spam service."

Cutts responded with a blog post on the subject, the snarky tone of which comes just short of calling Claburn a major tool. (He doesn’t call him that, of course. See: Cutts’ Guide to Corporate Blogging.)

"I had a bunch of spam-related work to do this morning," writes Cutts, presumably wiping the sweat from his brow in mid-knee-bend, "so I just dashed out a 15 minute reply."

"It makes sense that you’re not familiar with start pages; they’re much more common in Dutch. That’s why the second half of the post was in Dutch. Over half of Google’s traffic is from outside the U.S., so it’s only natural that we communicate about quality and spam in other languages — I believe we’re the only major U.S. search engine that does so.

"Google provides guidance in lots of non-English markets about individual practices in that market. For example, link exchanges are more popular in Polish and French than in English. I wouldn’t expect you to know that, but we pay attention to spam trends in lots of different languages, employ algorithms to counter webspam, and additionally try to communicate with webmasters and site owners to prevent spam in the first place."

If you’re not familiar with Southern US language nuances, that was a polite way to say "kiss it."
 
He also delves into the AdSense for Domains issue, too, which you can read at the blog. 

To be fair, on the surface it does seem the two would be difficult to distinguish via technical definition. But just like on the issue of decency, one might know spam when he sees it. Spam emails, spam blogs, spam comments, are almost universally simple to distinguish from the real deal, and that’s what the issue sounds like here too.

On the original Webmaster Central post that brought these questions before the court, Selina and Jos spell out startpage guidelines that will keep them from being tagged as webspam. They’re actually quite similar to Google’s guidelines in general:

1.    Create content for users, not search engines, with no hidden text, using full sentences instead of keyword strings.

2.    Keep content on-topic, using anchor text with every link that is relevant to that topic.

3.    "Don’t create startpages out of commercial intent or for the sole purpose of exchanging links. Of course there is nothing wrong with trying to monetize your startpage, but a page with only banners and affiliate links is not the best user experience and therefore not recommended. The same goes for startpages that are created as part of a link network."