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Q: What measures will be taken to combat Spam; will reporting help or will Google allow Spam to flourish?

A: From a Webmaster point of view, it doesn’t take much time to file a report if you feel something unfair is going on. I would definitely read through our guidelines first to make sure it’s something that we would agree is spam.

Reporting a site that you feel is spamming certainly won’t hurt. Now let’s talk about what sort of actions Google might take. There are some blatant things that we may take immediate action on. For example, if off-topic porn shows up for a search on someone’s name, that’s often worth doing something on a short time frame. Sites that have duplicate content or mirrored sites, those are the sorts of things that we probably wouldn’t take manual action on; we would instead look at using that data to write better algorithms. Our ultimate goal is to improve quality using only automated algorithms. Those algorithms may take longer to get right, but the nice thing is that when they’re done, they can often shut down an entire type of spam. So it doesn’t hurt to do a spam report, it gives us feedback about how to improve our search, and many spam reports end up as data that we use when testing our new algorithms.

Q: Are there penalties that last forever? What would be a possibility to remove these penalties from one's websites?

A: There are things that need a manual review before they’re lifted. If a Webmaster is pretty sure that they did something wrong, they can mail to Webmaster at google.com with the subject line “reinclusion request.” It helps to describe what you think happened, and what you changed on the site to make sure that everything is in good shape now.

Q: I have heard that it is always better to let Google FIND a site, rather than submit it. Does submitting a site directly to Google vs. letting Googlebot find it have any consequence in Google's algorithm?

A: The main difference is that when we find a site after crawling the web, we know that there’s at least some credible person on the web that is “voting” for your site by linking to it. So we have a PageRank value for that page, even if the PageRank is very low. With a submitted page, we really don’t have any external verification that anyone but the submitter thinks the site is good. So it never hurts to submit your site, but I would also take the time to see if you can find some related sites or a part of the Open Directory to link to your new site.

Posted by "GoogleGuy" a Google employee in the WebMasterWorld forum. The above was edited slightly for readability.

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2003, WebMarketingNow.com
Jerry West is the Director of Internet Marketing for Web Marketing Now. He has been consulting on the web since 1996 and has assisted hundreds of companies gain an upper-hand over their competition. Visit Web Marketing Now for the latest in marketing tips that are tested and proven.

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