The Best Way to Report Spam to Google

By Jonathan Bailey • Mar 21st, 2008 • Category: Articles, Videos

Google Webmaster Tools ImageI was going through videos of past WordCamp presentations to prepare for my own next week and found myself re-watching a presentation by Google’s Matt Cutts that he gave at WordCamp San Francisco in 2007.

At the forty minute mark in the presentation, Cutts said something that was interesting to those of us who deal with spam blogs but has been largely overlooked. When discussing Google’s Webmaster Center, he mentioned that you can report spam through their Webmaster Tools feature and that they “give more weight” to those reports than the ones made through their public form.

In short, if you have access to Google’s Webmaster Tools, which is free and easy to register for, you can use the form in there to file a more meaningful spam report. Best of all, the form is identical to the public one and and should not seem foreign to anyone used to filing spam reports.

How to report Google SpamThis is assumedly because the spam form in the Webmaster Tools is not anonymous, unlike the public one. Google, understandably, gives more significance to reports where they know the party providing the information.

To file the report, simply log into the Webmaster tools dashboard and click the “Report spam in our index” link on the right hand side. You report paid links.

This may resolve many of the claims that Google does not respond (see comments) to spam reports.

All in all, while this is a very simple trick, it might help with the reporting of spam in cases where a DMCA notice is simply not practical.

Note: In a strange coincidence, I found the video on John Pozadzides blog, who will be speaking directly before me at WordCamp Dallas.

Jonathan Bailey is The Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today, which he founded in 2005 as a way to help Webmasters going through content theft problems get accurate information and stay up to date on the rapidly-changing field. He is also a consultant to Webmasters and companies to help them devise practical content protection strategies and develop good copyright policies.
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4 Responses »

  1. According to cybele on March 21st, 2008 at 12:11 pm:

    I’m curious what would be considered a spam blog in Google’s eyes. I know what they are, but I’m not sure what Google would consider sploggy … and would I have to find it via a search?

  2. According to Jonathan Bailey on March 21st, 2008 at 12:15 pm:
    Cybele: It is interesting to see what Google does and does not consider spam. I just try to listen to Google when they say they want to present the best results to the user and consider anything that tries to push inferior results to the top to be spam.

    That said, what one considers inferior is a pretty subjective thing at times.

    You don’t have to find it via a Google search but you still have to find it in one. You can backtrack using keywords found on the spam page or exact quotes from the article even. You just need to produce the query and the URL of the search result.

    Hope that helps!

  3. According to Darren Hoyt on March 22nd, 2008 at 10:26 am:

    Thanks for this, Jonathan. It may not cut back on the spam I’m seeing, but I’m glad to know I can get decent reporting tools and do my own investigations.

    Been enjoying the WP podcasts!

  4. According to Jonathan Bailey on March 22nd, 2008 at 4:18 pm:
    Darren: Glad you liked the article! However, I have a long way to go to repay the debts for the theme so thank you very much for creating Mimbo!

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