Google Weblog

June 07, 2002: Spam, Spam, Spam ....

SearchDay: The Search Engine Spam Police. On Google, in particular:

Jen McGrath, Software Engineer at Google, advised webmasters to create sites with appropriate, relevant content and a straightforward design. In other words, make a useful site that clearly benefits your end users.

McGrath also advised webmasters to submit your site to web directories and let other sites link to you. Your site does benefit from the sites that link to it. However, your site can be penalized for the sites that you link to. Spam penalties include demotion and removal from Google's index.

Some items that Google considers spam are:

  1. Cloaking.
  2. Automated queries to Google to check positioning. The goal of this is primarily to tweak a site for positioning purposes, not to create content that benefits end users.
  3. Hidden text or hidden links.
  4. Stuffing pages with irrelevant keywords.
  5. Doorway pages, domains, and subdomains with the same or similar content.
  6. "Sneaky" redirects.

Report possible spam abuse via email to spamreport@google.com.

You can also fill out Google's Report a Spam Result form if you see a spam page.

Posted by Aaron Swartz on June 07, 2002 05:16 PM