Google Calling for link spam reports

Google are stepping up their never ending battle to combat spammy links with an appeal from MC on his personal blog for people to report spammy sites. There are two issues here:

  1. Paid links are being targeted as a priority… still.

  2. Sites, like forums and blogs, that allow spammy commenting like ‘nice info, thanx’ will be penalised for allowing Google’s lovely index to be cluttered up with spammy backlinks.

Google Calling for link spam reports Scroll down a bit to find the entry.

  1. Sites, like forums and blogs, that allow spammy commenting like ‘nice info, thanx’ will be penalised for allowing Google’s lovely index to be cluttered up with spammy backlinks.

As blogger, I used to moderate comments at my blogs to prevent spammy comments. Learn how to do it also.

Yes, that’s exactly the point. By penalising blogs and forums that allow spammy one line wonder link drop posts, they’re encouraging forum and blog owners to do what you suggested.

In this area, I wear my “web user” hat.

There are two ways I perceive “web spam”: (i) when a good page gets contaminated with bad links, and (ii) when I do a web search and get a worthless page in the results. Both of these are forms of blight that make my life work.

Many forms of spammy link contribute to problem (i), whereas, as far as problem (ii) is concerned, I’m more concerned about the quality of the page than I am about the quality of the links.

Although some webmasters are “absentee landlords” and let people go crazy with XRumer on their forums, the majority of them hate type-I blight, and join with search engines to fight it.

Paid links, however, are a different matter, because, given the chance to get seven years worth of Adsense income in one lump sum (and still get the Adsense income in the future!), many webmasters will leap at the chance. If paid links are placed wisely, it’s difficult to detect them and even harder to “prove” conclusively.

I think Google’s war on paid links is unfortunately more about intimidation than it is about effective tactical action. I think some people will be dissuaded, but others will not.

The real problem that I see isn’t the bad links, but it’s the lack of good links. Many of my friends believe that ‘if you build they will come’ applies to web sites – they learn the hard way that it doesn’t. Maybe it was different 15 years ago, but organic links don’t come easily in 2010.

“Quality” links are, definition, sites from people who have a lot more “juice” than you… Be that observable traffic or the elusive “Page Rank”. There are what, 20 million web sites out there? Sure, most of them are a joke, but it starts getting tough to find sites “bigger than you” when you’re in the top 200,000. You’re still a “nobody” with a top-200,000 site, but you’re still in the top 1%, so 99% of the sites out there aren’t going to give you significant links.

I don’t envy anybody who analyzes link graphs for a living, because the power law character of link graphs makes the data noisy and capricious. Link graphs are a powerful method for resource discovery for resources that are in richly linked parts of the graph (Wikipedia is a great resource… duh!) but linkage information doesn’t give Google good information about the quality of “ordinary” web sites.

Bloody hell. That’s great news. It’ll be interesting to see how they deal with the reports though. We know from personal experience just how hard it is to stop that kind of thing from going on, no matter how hard you fight it.

This is great news! If there’s anyone out there who has the best talent to combat this type of thing effectively, it’s Google. Oh, and the SitePoint staff. You guys rock too! :smiley:

We may not have a problem with spammy backlinks (as they get dropped pretty quickly) but the forum is filled with “thanks for the info” posts :lol:

Thanks for the info. :rofl:

forums and blogs should also do some initiative since its also for their own good…

There are lots of ways to hide paid links from Google. My guess is that they’ll use all the reports outing sites that do it (and there will be many…) to improve the algo’s ability to spot paid link profiles. I think it’s more of an information gathering exercise than the actual effort to combat paid links, that will come later when they’ve digested all the reports.

I’ve always been confused about something regarding this issue - what’s the difference between someone paying you to advertise on your site, or paying for a link? I’ve done occasional advertising but have never engaged in paying for a link or accepting money just to post a link to someone’s site.

And how could anyone know if a link on a site was paid for or put there by the site owner? Perhaps I’ve missed a crucial, yet simple point somewhere along the way??

Forgive me if I sound ignorant, but this has confused me for some time and I’ve been working so much it’s time to catch up on things like this.

Me too…

I recently had a client ask if it was worth paying for a link. The site offering to provide the link was relevant and on topic. A quick intake of breath from me, then I told them that search engines don’t like paid links. Consequently, they decided not to go for the paid link. Ironically, the site went ahead an gave them a free link anyway. The link is actually listed in their advertisements section. At least they aren’t paying for the privilege of being labeled as spammy.

(maybe there’s a niche for charging people not to link to them? :slight_smile:

Well it will be a more tricky , to find out paid links. But Spam links are easy to find out, specially Thanks or nice info they are just spam, some time spammers also put too much links in their comments specially in the Blogspot blogs. I had seen many spam links in the comment section specially in the blogspot.
So its good news that now Google is taking this issue seriously and are going to deal with these Spam…

It’s against Google ToS if you pay for a link that passess SEO benefits like PR. If it’s just for human traffic that’s ok but the link should be ‘nofollowed’.

I get requests all the time from people who want to purchase links and I have many fellow bloggers (even the one who referred me to this site) who make their money with text links.

But how does Google know they are paid? Are they just going to take wild stabs in the dark? That sounds pretty bad for PR.

I can tell you now, Google will never beat the spammers and the spammers will never beat Google.

Google put a hurdle infront of the spammers, and the spammers find a way around it. Spamming blogs, as we all know, is a method to gain backlinks. There are 2 tools that spring to mind that do this very well.

The spammers make a lot of money from their highly ranked sites. Once you cut their income, they work damn hard to find another way. A lot of the big earners are not silly.

It’s a never ending battle and it will never end.

As long as Google have algorithms for giving authority and weight to web pages, spammers (or, we will call them Internet Marketers because 99% of them are) will always find a way around it.

What if you really mean to say thanks for the info to the one who posted the info? Will it be considered a spam?


Permalinks are great for archive purposes - instead of saying “scroll down a bit…”. Here’s the link to the blog post:

Yes, thanks. ‘scroll down a bit’ was a bit rubbish wasn’t it. :slight_smile:

it is considered fluff and it is against our forum guidelines

ask yourself how someone would feel seeing that there has been an update to a particular thread they’re interested in, only to find that the latest update was totally devoid of new information

if you wish to thank someone, send a private message