Call for spam reports in five languages

I recently returned from a vacation to Japan, Hong Kong, and Thailand. It was a ton of fun and I hope to blog about it at some point — each country was of course unique and each offered different, wonderful experiences. From the cherry blossoms and the kindness shown to me by my colleagues at the Google Tokyo office in Japan, to the hustle and bustle and skyscrapers of Hong Kong, to the beautiful landscapes, people (and elephants!) of Thailand, I relished every minute. The trip also redoubled my interest in webspam in world-wide languages. 🙂

Google has always cared about search quality in dozens of languages, not just English. We’re trying a new experiment in webspam: we decided to identify five languages where we’d really like to drill down into webspam, solicit spam reports in those languages, and pay even more attention to spam reports in those languages over the next couple months. If you know of spam in these languages, we’d especially like to hear about it.

The five languages where we’re asking for spam reports are Thai, Indonesian, Romanian, Czech, and Farsi. Of course, we always welcome webspam reports — in any language! — at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport but we’d be especially interested to hear about spam in Thai, Indonesian, Romanian, Czech, and Farsi. If you know of webspam in those languages, please let us know, and thanks!

61 Responses to Call for spam reports in five languages (Leave a comment)

  1. Hey Matt

    Would you be kind enough to tell us what countries you DO NOT have spam reports?

  2. Robert Enriquez, we’re happy to get spam reports for any country or language. This is just an experiment where we try to get more reports about spam for these specific five languages.

  3. hello Matt
    thanks for interesting in Farsi spam sites. my language is Farsi Or Persian. when i search a word in Farsi i found just more than 50 spam sites anywhere in search resaults in Farsi. and it hurts Farsi users.
    I research about SEO and Google about 3 years. i see all of your videos and read all of you blog post. i can help you with Farsi spam sites. you can contact me at any time.

    Ali

  4. Ha, you missed the sarcasm from Robert, or maybe I just know him too well. He’s looking to set up shop in countries where he can avoid getting reported. lol.

  5. I don’t know why but I’m not so surprised that Romanian is one of those five languages. Some of those who own websites and want to promote them for some keyphrases are a little bit to rushed about and use all sort of tricks to put themself above the competition in short notice. Isn’t just the Romania case, but that’s what i’ve observed in the last 3 years and a half.

    Good thing is that more and more people learn how to optimize their websites. So hopefully you will not see to many spam reports for romanian language 😛

  6. Hey Matt,
    Glad you mention Romanian language. I’m here making independent evaluation of bad seo web sites and webspam techniques used by SEO Agencies.

    Every day I’m discovering new webspam (massive link manipulation, keyword stuffing and other)

    Right now I’m on the way to submit another link manipulation 🙂

    Best regards,

  7. Matt,

    What made you target those specific 5 languages? One of the reasons I’m asking this is I’m a romanian.

  8. Very nice but When will Turkish webspam reports Matt..

  9. Matt –
    Are you trying to drill down on these five languages because they are the origins of a large portion of spam?

  10. In Roumania every child can build a website in few days…so they spam with repeated keywords and massive link exchange. An example: vitanclub.net more than 120.000 IPs/Day !

  11. I know Google uses these spam reports to adjust their algorithms which helps in the long run, but how can Google adjust their policy to assist Webmasters today that play fair but are losing out to spam sites?

    Example in point is a website I’ve reported many times using the spam reports and had confirmed/reported as a spam site by other webmasters, but they continue in their ways with impunity.

  12. Matt, why doesn’t Google hire few webmasters that can do the job? I could easly clean serps for big keywords, and I’ve already tought before reading this of doing it myself.

    I really feel like I (we, webmasters) have to start a small revolution and give these webmasters the allarm that it is time to change, we need quality, yes, in Romania too. I’ve already started giving some help as a ODP Editor in Romania, I was not surprised to see mirror websites, websites with no content or spam websites beeing added to ODP…

    It happens that I’ve just reported of some romanian websites copying my written content with whole websites just made of spam (mainly RSS aggregators) and now I see your post asking for help, I can’t be happier.

    Google will have all the help needed from me, It’s pretty easy to spot the black hats. Hidden text, keyword stuffers, large scale link exchange…you name it we have it.

    I think that as webmasters, we’re the ones that should bring quality to the web and this also means, helping Google to understand what are the quality websites and who are the spammers.

    @Yabanci you can report in any language, Google just needs more help for these serps that are heavly spammed.

  13. Matt, this whole spam reporting is all good and all, I can totally agree with the need to ensure that only the highest quality and most relevant sites make it to Google’s index, however, wont the reporting function just encourage people to dob in their competition? I mean, I don’t know about anyone else here, but I know I’ve got a few that rank higher than me, and I would love to get some dirt on them to get them out of the way…. Hell, I even thought I would earn them a ton of irrelevant .gov backlinks, submit to a million social bookmarking sites with the same anchor text, then report them for the very spam that I have made.

    See what I mean when it just doesn’t feel right?

  14. It would be nice if English was taken care of 🙂 JK. I know you guys work you butts off at Google and the results are pretty dang good.

  15. We Romanian users have already found out that reporting spam to Google is pointless – for more than a year lots of us report the same sites and nothing is done.

    Same crappy sites full of keywords, ads and affiliate links appear all the time in the first two pages… if I want meaningful results I usually start with the third page.

  16. Hi guys,

    Sorry Matt. I can’t help you out with this. Because I’m not familiar with spam reports in different languages.

    Kind regards,

    Sam
    X

  17. Seems ironic that you are openly asking for more spam reports when it seems like you do nothing with the existing reports.

  18. If I google “language web spam” and then click wonder Wheel, one of the links is know your neighbors

  19. Hey Matt,

    I think many people still don’t understand your meaning of ‘Spam’ from an SEO or google perspective, the categories in your form are quite numerous. Maybe you can shoot out something which is clearer in terms of what you guys need? thanks

  20. I’m trying to report spam on a web site in hebrew for almost 2 month, is there anyone that check it out for hebrew? the web site use pure spam ..

  21. (romania) We’ve submited a lot of spam reports and nothing happened. Websites with romanian content use spammy ways to get trafic and we’re trying to clean the SERPs but with no succes. Is anyone reviewing our spam reports?

    Maybe now that Google will have an office in Romania they will hire more staff to take care of the spam reports.

  22. Hey Matt,

    I also like to have a simplified form in WebMaster Tools for spam report (without query and Google URL). Let’s take the case:

    User is looking for something in the Google, enter an LP with spam techniques, then is clicking a few links, and enter other websites, also with webspam on LP.

    The first LP has query and search URL, but the rest of them don’t have. Most of users will understand to submit with query and Google URL.

    I think Google has the right tools to identify ranking for LPs without query and URL and will be a plus if you encourage users to submit the link in a simplified form.

    Regards

  23. Hello Matt! I add you to the theme?
    Add function to report of illegal content on the site!
    Or are you afraid of the great work!?;)
    And thanks your link will be useful in Russia!!! 🙂
    P.S.
    Matt I do blog (click on my name and enjoy club music) and I feel the problem in finding a beautiful gadgets translate …
    I can not put your google gadgets, because I’m afraid of irritating my visitors (sorry)!
    I hope google translate finalize the design, also bonus in other languages search for sites?!
    My blog for all, but unfortunately today I am denying that many people!
    And I think in the future at each site, we will see translate and I am very glad that the “google search” invites me to sites in other languages! This is very helpful!
    And I can tell you about spam site in Russia, if you need!
    Good Luck! 😉

  24. Matt,

    I’m currently trying to get into the Italian market for SEO Services, if I find any spam there I will certainly report it.

    On a separate note, can you point me to anything Google has regarding seo and translation for that matter in regards to the Italian market and Google.it

    Thanks
    Frank

  25. ด้านไม่ เลวร้าย

  26. The above comment is matt, dont be evil…in thai..but weirdly that then translates with to “not the bad” huhh?

  27. Matt, having stumbled across plenty of undesirable sites in Thai, Indonesian, Czech, and Romanian I sort of understand your selection.

    But Farsi? What’s up with that? I haven’t seen any Farsi thin affiliates or malware sites. Am I missing out on some of the fun here?

  28. Just a general feeling I have (Might be wrong), is that almost all sites that use the ACE format in domain names are spam. This is at least true for the scandinavian countries where internet where well established before the possibility to use national letters in domain names, and therefore it quickly became the norm for all serious companies to avoid this.

    So maybe it is the same in these countries? (And yes, I have problems with spammers using ace format, but doesn’t make the claim less valid I think 😉 What do people from the affected countries think? )

  29. Matt, Our SEO Blog has been getting bombarded with foreign spam lately. I have no idea what it says, or even what language it is. Here is a sample I took from a few days ago. ( I hope it isn’t inappropriate). Thanks Matt, Hope this helps!

    партнера? Шатен остановился, снял футболку, вытер ей пот со лба и повязал

  30. Most ‘Indonesian’ spam is done in English I think, but that’s a different thing…I’m drawing a bit of a blank at the moment on real specifics but I’m thinking mainly Adult and also anything to do with male enhancement….

  31. Matt, Hong Kong is the is only big city I vacation in and still feel rested. Been there 3 times and Phuket about 6 times.

  32. Hi, matt:

    It is not smart or that smart or very smart… for you not to bring your beautiful wife to visit shanghai, esp at shanghai expo time while you guys go visit Japan, Hong Kong, and Thailand for vocation.

    Google escaped from Mailand China to HK, that doenst mean you have to escape from mailand China as a googler. right?

    Please you must bring your wife visit shanghai at shanghai expo time as you can use free clean public toilet in town at least.
    and I would like to be you guys’ free city guider.

    By the way, any bloggers, please dont hesitate to ask a local help in shanghai china from author wanglili.

    It is best choice for you guys to visit shanghai at shanghai expo time as I dont know what will be happening to shanghai public toilets after shanghai expo time.

  33. I wish there was a way to stop plumbers from spamming with multiple sites and phone numbers on google maps. It is quite frustrating and difficult to compete with these spammers.Every keyword is loaded with spam listings on google maps for plumbing in Atlanta.I would like to see google tackle the maps spam with some kind of ingenious way of verifying businesses actual physical location.

  34. Hi Matt,
    I have another report of link manipulation (Romania). It’s hard to send it via Webmaster Tools since are discover landing from site to site and back link checkering.

    If you are interested in this report you can contact me any time you wish at the email provided in comment form.

    Regards,

  35. Hi…
    Yeah that’s awesome, do you have any plan about French???

  36. Morris Rosenthal

    Matt,

    How about spam reports in the universal language, pictures.

    I’ve been pretty annoyed lately that Google search on my name brings up images, above the fold, that are frequently linked to pirate sites offering free (or infected, or password locked pay the pirate) downloads of my books. I keep reporting them with the “report” tool for image search, but I suspect it’s a sort of consensus gun that one person on one IP can’t reliably operate:-)

    It’s unfortunate because the average person using Google would probably believe that if Google is displaying a book cover or graphic for an author’s name, the site it links would be legitimate.

    Morris

  37. Matt,

    Glad you brought this up, because I would like to know when is Google going to crack down on the Chinese Back Link Spam Sites?

    Look at these back link profiles;

    https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.shoppingpolo.com%2F&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=u

    https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oG7zQiSuRLXpUAiHDbl8kF?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newpoloshirts.com%2F&bwm=i&bwmf=u&bwmo=d&b=101

    99% of the content on any of these sites is utter nonsense and gibberish.

    Yet it helps these sites rank # 1 & # 2 in Google for Polo Shirts, a key word that goes for $2.00 to $6.00 a shot depending on the variation

    Webmasters who “play by the rules” (trying to naturally get relevant, high quality links) do not stand a chance against these spammers.

    Somewhere in China, thousands of these type of crap pages are being churned out daily, by thousands of boiler room operations.

    Google should be embarrassed that it is so easily manipulated.

  38. It’s good to see that you guys are making sure to receive reports from different languages but it would be a lot better if you took the reported sites down quicker.

    There are some cases that spammers keep top positions for months with sneaky redirects and manage to dominate high trafficked keywords for a long period of time killing the honest websites income!

    All the universities and some .GOV sites are commonly used to create user generated keyword stuffed pages with thousands of black hat low quality incoming links. Why aren’t they penalized for allowing malware/spam in their domains? Google is always making rules for the small webmaster that don’t affect the big institutions.

  39. Unless Google takes a top-down approach to spam I will not dob in a [strong]victim[/strong] of a SEO “professional”. And, unless Google starts banning the cause of SEO spam, it’s fighting a losing battle.

  40. Good news for other Southeast Asian countries. Hope that Vietnamese language is in your future plan. At the moment and in near future, we have lots of spammers, who make people think of SEO as spam…

  41. Matt… Farsi is my native tongue. Why are you so interested in Farsi? Just curious.

  42. I have a question for you Matt which I think will be a useful topic for other webmasters out there if you are able to answer it as it hasn’t been touched on before (that I’m aware of)

    Going from spammy to legitimate, can it happen and how does Google react?

    Here is the situation: We admit it – we have a website which is about 300 pages in size and 95% of the content has been copied from other sources. As a result, Google has (quite rightly) given us terrible ranks for our main target keywords, although we do rank quite highly for the pages we have written ourselves on niche topics.

    Over the past 4 months we have been on a mission to right the situation – we have redesigned, recoded and most importantly rewritten ALL of the content. As part of the spring cleaning we are also moving to a new domain and rebranding the company.

    The question is, should we:

    a) just delete the old spammy site and let Google discover the new site on its own
    b) implement 301 redirects from the old and follow the rest of Google’s guidelines for moving domain

    The reason we’re thinking of doing a) is that we’re worried that if there are any penalties in place for our copied content they’ll also be transferred to our new (and now completely legitimate) website.

  43. Dave, I must admitt I feel the same “fighting a losing battle” some sites I’ve reported are for years on top and nothing changed (and they 100% webspam)

  44. Farsi too? darn it …LOL 🙂

    good move Matt

  45. Hi,

    Just a quick question : Google allows linking same domain with different .tld ?

    I found a domain ranking very well ( soft82.com ) which has a lot of backlinks from soft82.org ( on each product page h**p://soft82.org/download/windows/norman-malware-cleaner/, above the product name )

    Is this a fair technique ? Both domains have the same IP.

    Thanks

  46. I agree with Constantin, big spammers even after repeated reports, keep their pages and positions, many times at the top of the serps.

  47. Hi,

    Off topic I know.

    I heard that you were coming to Dublin and giving some talks at the end of May. I was wondering how I can get an invite to any one of those.

    Thanks
    Leslie

  48. I doubt Google treats big spammers seriously, they just give the illusion they do. You have sites like wordpressthemesbase.com and wicked-wordpress-themes.com who steal commercially made wordpress themes, modify the footers with their own sponsored casino/pills spam urls and interestingly they rank on page #1 for “wordpress themes”. They are smart enough to not show their spammy urls on their preview pages, you only see it when you download then install the theme because the footers are encrypted. I guess Google engineers can’t be bothered investigating that deep. Each day thousands of new blogs popup on the Internet, all stolen and filled with black hat urls that paid their way into Google. This has been happening for years. Not sure why Google is going after the little guys, when these guys are unleashing thousands of spammy sites every week, what’s worst is the blog owners have no idea they have these blackhat links on their blogs. These sites are under the illusion Google is not doing anything about this so they keep starting new sites which do the same thing. If you search for wordpress themes, you see a bunch of sites that have no advertisers, no brand names, no contact information, just themes for download, which are filled with spam, these guys are contributing massively to the quality of the Google index. If people believe Google knows how to devalue WordPress theme footer links, it is simply not true, sites like webhostinggeeks.com who got to number #1 position for “Web Hosting”, Website Hosting, and basically any term with “Hosting” got there by just whacking their links on their theme footers. There is talk on a webmaster forum where hundreds of other webmasters are now attempting to stealing themes, whack in spammy urls and copy what these other spammy sites are doing. People see the success in blackhat and Google does nothing to stop it.

  49. Matt,

    Is there such thing as building to many links, if your following Google’s webmaster guidelines exactly? Too many where you would get banned, even if your following the rules?

    Thanks,

    Mark

  50. Hey Matt,

    I have been a critical last time about those calls for link spam reports. On the other hand, I am quite curious this time about the whole thing. The Romanian web is way to spammy, what is partly due to the fact that many people there still think spammy techniques are nothing but acceptable, best practices for setting up and promoting their site. I am not talking about our those real Black-hat dudes, they know pretty much what they are doing but about the average Joes engaging in excessive link exchange schemes. Maybe you could share some of your results with your readers like they share their information with you? That would be interesting 🙂

    Thanks

  51. Hi Matt,

    I’m glad about this initiative. Spam in the Google results is very frustrating.

    Would you mind giving us a few details about how these spam reports are handled and how long it can take to see the confirmed spam removed from the search results?

    Thank you in advance.

  52. Nice… less spam in any language is a good thing. 🙂

  53. what about spam in French ?
    see http://deinternetmarketeer.be/2010/05/06/spam-of-geen-spam/
    or type “location de vacances” in google.be u will understand
    u can also type “rencontres gratuites” it is funny, this spam is there
    for years now, personnaly I had to move out of that business ( dating ) because it was impossible to be ranked
    Now I see the problem is the same on the Rental Holiday :-/

  54. Oops, talking about quality “Positions are available … Spanish, Turkish and Spanish.” 🙂
    http://www.google.ie/intl/en/jobs/dublin/adsales/techops/search-quality-associate-multiple-languages-available-eu-headquarters/index.html

  55. Microsoft revamps Hotmail, takes on Google and Yahoo

    In the blog post, Microsoft program manager Dick Craddock said the company studied e-mail usage for a year while considering the changes.

    “People made it clear to us that the No. 1 thing they wanted their e-mail service to address — whether it was Hotmail or any other e-mail service — was to help them manage the clutter in their inbox; not just the spam, but all the mail they get that’s clogging their inboxes.”

  56. Could you tell me that how much time does Google need to expand the Spam report to another Asia country? (besides that 4 countries)

  57. When Google attention of the Chinese SEO SPAM?

  58. Mat,
    I have a question about what is considered spam. For example http://www.lenderhomepage.com ranks #1 with the following keywords: Mortgage Website Design, Mortgage Website Development, Mortgage Web Design, Mortgage Website. If you look at the code of one of their customer sites http://www.wjmortgage.com you can see that their hiding the link back to their site using the noframes tag.

    Welcome to our website. We know that each customer has specific needs, so we strive to meet those specific needs with a wide array of products, investment tools, mortgages and best of all quality service and individual attention.Today’s technology is providing a more productive environment to work in. For example, through our website you can submit a complete on-line, secure loan application or pre-qualify for a home loan. You may also evaluate your different financing options by using our interactive calculators and going over various mortgage scenarios.Mortgage Website Design, Mortgage Website Development, Mortgage Web Design, Mortgage Website Template

    Thanks,
    Bryan Owen

  59. I’m getting more and more frustrated to see these spam sites in Indonesian scraping our blog contents. I’ve reported so many of them, but they still exists today. I understand that the report is used to learn the techniques used by these spammers. But time passed by, and there are more and more of them in Google index, using the same method of spamming.

    This is because it’s very easy to create spam sites using WordPress. All they need to do is put SimplePie plugin in the WordPress search page, grab feeds from Google Blogsearch and displayed them. I don’t remember searching something in Google.co.id and didn’t see these sites in the results.

    For us who only use Blogger.com, we constantly become the victim of these sites, because they scrape all our blog posts.

  60. What happens If some other person build hundreds of spam links for my site and send a spam report to google? Would google devalue my site’s ranking? If it was, I would start to build spam links for my competitors and send spam reports to google.

  61. Hi Matt

    I hope you read this as I have a simple solution to fight blog and forum spam !!

    I am involved in SEO for a website which operates in a very competitive niche. Whilst I understand that Google uses algorithyms to judge the placement of websites within search engine results and is constantly fighting spam, there are several websites of our competitors that are using unfair SEO techniques in order to manipulate these rankings. While Google assures businesses that they are fighting spam and will act upon it then its very disconcerting to find that despite some of our competitors breaking Google’s guidelines they still continue to dominate search engine results and have done so for a long time. When I analyse the backlink profiles of our competitors I can find several of them have many hundreds of forum or blog comments as backlinks and in many cases it can be easily concluded that these are merely “Forum Spam” and “Blog Spam” comments placed for the purpose of gaining an incoming link designed to fool Google algorithyms into giving their website popularity and in many cases they gain links using competitive keywords as anchor text.

    Whilst it would be easy of me to give you all the URLS’s or file spam reports about those sites that are forum/blog spamming, I still think would not solve the problem for the many thousands of other businesses in the many other industries on the internet that are also victims of this unfair cheating from unscrupulous businesses.

    Therefore I would like to offer Google a very simple solution to this problem.

    Google can encourage internet surfers who come across spam forums to just leave a comment – such as “This is spam” and Google bot can have a simple addition to the algorithym, where upon detecting the phrase “This is spam” then that page can be logged and then investigated by Google raters and either tagged as not spam or spam depending on what the rater sees. If the rater logs the page as spam then the algorithym simply discounts that page from passing any ranking to other pages, the page itself does not need to be de-indexed as it may still hold valuable information which is not in the comments. In this way other businesses who notice competitors using blog and forum spam to manipulate SERPS will also be able to leave a “this is spam” comment. I believe this simple technique would help Google to fight this kind of spam, however this would work only on blogs and forums that have become obvious targets and are full of spammy comments and links.

    However to further this then when Google bot notices the same websites appearing over and over on pages that are tagged as spam then the algorithym can then log all the URL’s in that backlink profile of that website for investigation by raters and the process would go full circle as more and more URLS’ would be found which would like to more and more spam pages.

    Obviously theres the chance of competitors doing it to their competitors as an attempt do harm them, but if those links on pages logged as spam are simply discounted then there would be no harm done and only in obvious cases where sites have only spam as backlinks then these sites could be de-indexed.

    I think once spammers realise this is happening they would not bother adding their comments as they would eventually realise it would have no effect.

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