Google put out a new Webmaster Help video today. This time Matt Cutts talks about the company’s efforts to fight webspam on a global scale, as opposed to just in the U.S. and in English.
The video was a response to the user-submitted question:
Europe is small compared with USA, so will Google get a webspam team for smaller markets?
“It turns out we actually do have a webspam team based in Europe (in Dublin, in fact), and they’re able to handle webspam and tackle spam reports in a wide variety of languages, so on the order o well over a dozen – dozens of languages, because there’s a lot of smart people there,” says Cutts. “So we actually have people on the ground in a lot of different offices around the world, and we also have engineers in Zurich. We have an engineer in Hong Kong, but there’s a lot of people who have native experience…people who think about spam in Russia, but also a lot of people in Dublin, who have done a fantastic job dealing with, you know, if an algorithm misses something, they’re there to find the spam. They know the lay of the land. They know who the big players are, and they’re really quite expert.”
“But if there’s some kind of really unique link spam going on in Poland, for example, there’s a person there, and those people are on top of that situation,” he adds. “So, I think it’s important that Google not be just a U.S.-centric or an English-centric company. We want to be international. We want to deal with all different languages, and it is the case that we might not have webpam full-time on every single language, but you would be pretty shocked at the number of languages that the webspam team collectively is able to fight spam in.”
Webspam is always a big issue for Google, but it’s been a particularly big issue in the search industry this year, thanks to Google’s launch of the Penguin update, designed to algorithmically tackle sites violating Google’s quality guidelines.
In another video from Google this week, Cutts said that about 90% of the messages Google sends out to webmasters are about black hat webspam.
More recent Webmaster Help videos from Matt Cutts here.
