Let’s take a very specific example and take a look. It isn’t normal that someone in the SEO community comes out and gives concrete examples, so take a look while it lasts. Take a look at the page, take a look at the backlinks to the page, and take a look at the search results (currently showing up on the 2nd page of results) for a Google keyword search for “wholesale sunglasses”. A highly sought-after commercial keyword phrase.

You’ll need to click on the screen capture above in order to see the larger version. In this case, there are two sites ranking in the top 20 for “wholesale sunglasses” that are some of the worst spam sites I’ve seen in a while. Visitors are redirected via javascript to another web site, something that Google supposedly took care of about 10 years ago. It’s a classic spam tactic and does NOT belong in the search results.

Furthermore, let’s take a look at one of the sites, why it’s actually ranking, as we can learn a lot from this.

First, it appears that the person doing this hacked a legitimate web site and put a page of content on the site without the site owner’s permission. Or, they may have bought the site and put up the old content. I’m not sure in this case, because I have not actually called the business to see if they are still in business or not.

Secondly, the actual content (shown below) is pretty low-quality. As low-quality as it gets. It is on-topic, though:

In this case, it’s this page: http://www.mykidsspending.com/wholesalesunglasses48.html which is ranking. If you click on the search result, it’s going to redirect to another site. If you have javascript turned off in you browser, it shows the content. This is what I call “poor man’s cloaking” at its finest. If you’re to cloak, at least do the cloaking at the IP level by using “IP Delivery” or some other product/script that identified Google’s IPs and only serves up the content to Google. But I digress.

What’s driving the actual rankings to that mykiddspending.com web page? It’s the links.

Links from Unique Domains: 1455
Links total: 11,801

There are a lot of links from a lot of unique domain names. That’s exactly what Google is looking for now–a lot of diversity. But take a look at the anchor text. This is the most colorful link anchor text that I’ve seen in a long while. And I see a lot of web sites’ backlinks.

So, we can definitely learn from this. Although the web sites (there are more than one ranking) are spamming and redirecting users to another site, and it appears that they’ve hacked other web sites in order to get the pages listed, the sites rank well. They rank well because of the diversity of links (lots of links from lots of unique domain names) as well as the diversity of anchor text links pointing to the site.

Comments

The answer to the question is yes, but Matt explains the possibilities of two penalties; on the manual side and on the algorithmic side. In case of a manual penalty, you can fix the spam and submit a request for reconsideration. If it's an algorithmic penalty, you will have to wait till the time algorithm picks up on the changes. The good thing with manual spam is that it has a time out, which means the penalty will auto-expire if you clean up the spam.

Matt also told that if the spam is very aggressive, it is difficult to recover from the penalty without cleaning it all up. It is not impossible but you will have to start with negative ranking, going below the ground to get back to the ground level. However, you will have to document all the steps you took in detail, while submitting a reconsideration request.

Matt said that, in case of a severely spammed domain name, he would have probably not bought it. He would have started with a clean and fresh domain.

He further revealed that a number of spammers spam and burn the domain name, and when caught, they try to sell in on a forum. Matt said, "you don’t want to be the sucker who gets stuck with that bad domain name".

Ask similar questions on the Webmaster Help Forum: http://groups.google.com/a/ googleproductforums.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters

Want your questions to be answered on videos, follow Google Webmaster Help Forum on Twitter http://twitter.com/googlewmc

More videos: http://www.youtube.com/GoogleWebmasterHelp

Webmaster Central Blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

Webmaster Central: http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Comments

No, conspiracy theories were put to rest when Google released a statement, saying that it was all just a big screwup.

We’re sorry about the inconvenience this morning to people trying to search for Digg. In the process of removing a spammy link on Digg.com, we inadvertently applied the webspam action to the whole site. We’re correcting this, and the fix should be deployed shortly.

And fixed it they have. Digg is back up in Google:

It’s not like being de-indexed in Google was really a killer for Digg, considering the majority of their traffic is direct. But for Digg, you’d at least want digg.com to show up in a search. Thankfully, Google has fixed the screwup and everyone can carry on.

Comments

The pages removed by Google use aggressive spam techniques such as scraping content from other websites, cloaking and automatically generated gibberish. The screenshots are generated automatically.

Here’re a few recent screenshots Google has published:

Google has also prepared a chart of manual anti-spam actions by category. They say only 0.22% of domains were manually marked for removal. They also came up with charts showing reconsideration requests and webmaster notifications.

Here’s is a chart showing manual actions by category:

Comments

Dear Webmaster,

Google has informed us that there is a spam link coming from your site to our site that we are being penalized for in our search results. Please remove this link as soon as possible. Thanks.

Maybe that sounds nice to you, but it irritates the crap out of me. Why? Because it makes it sound like I did something wrong that I owe it to them to correct so that they can regain their rightful God-given Google rankings.

What I do in response is to send this back to the webmaster:

Here is the e-mail that the you should have sent:

“I know you are busy but I would really appreciate a favor. We really screwed up when we hired a company to do search marketing for us because they went out and placed many spam comments on blogs including yours. We’re sorry that we were responsible for that.

We’re getting our comeuppance now because Google is punishing our search rankings because we have so many spammy links to our site. I know that this is all completely our fault, but it would mean a lot to us if you could delete this comment from your blog post.”

Most people don’t respond to my e-mail, but a few do, chastened. For me, these are the few who inspire hope. I’ve asked a few of them why they send such a disingenuous letter, and they tell me that they don’t believe that anyone would really help them if they told the truth.

To me, this is sad. They have the spammy links to their sites because they tried to fool blog owners and Google. When Google catches on to their chicanery, they decide to try to fool the blog owners again–to make those poor blog owners think they did something wrong.

To me this is the worst part of SEO–the ugly underbelly that survives on cheap tricks and cheaper lies. When we all stop trying to feign quality and start actually creating it, then search marketing will really become useful to searchers.

Comments

In 2008, spam accounted for over 90% of all email traffic, worldwide. Just think about that for a second. That’s a lot of spam. Since then, spam has been on the decline (with some exceptions). The spam share has really started to plummet since mid-2011, though.

Their latest report from the end of 2012 shows that spam now accounts for 67% of all global email traffic. Two-thirds may still seem like a lot, but it represents a significant decline from what it was just 4 years ago.

Of course, email isn’t the only place that spammers live. The rise of the social web has produced an all new breeding ground for spammers. One recent study suggested that up to 40% of all social media accounts worldwide were created with spamming in mind.

Now, go clean out your spam filter.

[Kaspersky Lab via The Economist]

Comments

The Facebook page asks users to use the form to report an Instagram Web Profile and gives the options of spam, nudity, hate speech, and underage user. There are links on the Facebook page the direct users back to Instagram for clarification on types of reporting.

“Instagram is owned by Facebook, so if you’re logged into Facebook we may use your Facebook account info to help us figure out what’s going on,” reads a message on the report form.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Facebook is beginning to integrate parts of Instagram after last year’s big acquisition. But that vague “you’re logged in, os we’re going to use that to find stuff out” message may give some privacy hounds some concern. Especially after the big privacy dustup that saw users enraged at Facebook/Instagram for changing its privacy policies to permit the selling of user photos. Kind of.

[h/t AllFacebook]

Comments

“Hi Instagrammers! We’ve appreciated all of your feedback on spam comments, and we want you to know we’re working hard on this to make sure spam doesn’t take away from your Instagram experience. There’s no quick fix, but we have a team of engineers working every day to tackle the issue and we hope you’ll notice their improvements. If you do see spam, please delete and report the comments to us, or visit that user’s profile, tap the button in the top right corner and select “Report for Spam.” Thanks for helping to keep the Instagram community a great experience for everyone!” said the company in a photo comment.

Instagram isn’t the only social network that’s turned their focus to spam problems. Last week, Pinterest announced a site-wide spammer purge to remove suspicious and fake accounts. Pinterest said that this move would help “protect the integrity” of the site and “ensure followers are real people who are interested in what you share.” For Instagram, it’s no different – they want users to feel like interactions with their content are genuine, instead of some lame promotion for a sketchy product or a pathetic plea for followers.

Instagram sure needs to focus on keeping the user experience top-notch, as they recently made the decision to cut of Twitter entirely. Instagram photos no longer show up on Twitter, as Instagram is doubling down on forcing Instagram users to get the Instagram experience, well, on Instagram.

Comments

What do you think of this info? Do share your views.

Comments

What do you think of this tip? Do share your views.

Comments