In today’s Webmaster Help video from Google, Matt Cutts discusses the search giant’s efforts in web spam fighting around the world. Many of us are very used to hearing about the efforts surrounding web spam in the United States, but efforts in other countries aren’t discussed quite so frequently.
Cutts responds to a question from an anonymous user, who asks:
Is the Webspam team taking the same measures to counter spam in international markets like India like they do in the US market? It just seems like there are a lot of junk sites that come up in the first page of results when searching on google.co.in.
“Remember, the web spam team has both the engineers who work on the algorithmic spam,” says Cutts .”We also have the manual web spam team, and both of those work on spam around the world. So, Google.co.in, you know, India…we want the algorithms, whether they be link spam or keyword stuffing or whatever to work in every language as much as we can. And so we do try to make sure that to the degree it’s possible for us to do it, we internationalize those algorithms.”
“At the same time, we also have people, including people in like Hyderabad, who are fighting spam not only in English, and on the .com domains, but also in India, you know, .IN as well,” he continues. So we have people who are able to fight spam in forty different languages based around the world. At the same time, I would agree that probably English spam in the United States on a .com definitely gets a lot of attention because not every single engineer can speak French or German or a particular language, but it is the case that we put a lot of work into trying to make sure that we do internationalize those.”
He adds, “Definitely if you see any results that are sub-optimal or that are generally bad, either do a spam report or show up in the webmaster forum, and drop a notice there. Feel free to send a tweet. That’s the sort of thing that we’re interested in, and we’d like to make sure that we do better on.”
Cutts notes that they use the feedback they get to try to improve future iterations of their web ranking algorithms.