Tag Archives: Google

How to Report Spam Search Results to Google

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When search results include spam, we all suffer.

Ever conduct a Google search, only to find that one of the top (non-sponsored) search results has no real value as far as your search criteria is concerned? In other words, the owner or Webmaster on the site has manipulated site content so it appears as a top search result but really has nothing to do with what you’re looking for?

That search result is considered spam by the folks at Google, and they want to stop it as much as we do.

What Google Says

From Google’s Report a Spam Result page:

We work hard to return the most relevant results for every search we conduct. To that end, we encourage site managers to make their content straightforward and easily understood by users and search engines alike. Unfortunately, not all websites have users’ best interests at heart. Trying to deceive (spam) our web crawler by means of hidden text, deceptive cloaking or doorway pages compromises the quality of our results and degrades the search experience for everyone.

We think that’s a bad thing, and so we request that, if your Google search returns a result that you suspect is spam, you please let us know by using this form. We thoroughly investigate every report of deceptive practices and take appropriate action when we uncover genuine abuse. In especially egregious cases, we will remove spammers from our index immediately, so they don’t show up in search results at all. At a minimum we’ll use the data from each spam report to improve our site ranking and filtering algorithms, which, over time, should increase the quality of our results.

Here’s what you can do to help

  1. Report a Spam ResultVisit www.google.com/ contact/ spamreport.html and scroll down to the Report a Spam Result form.
  2. In the Exact query box, paste in the contents of the Google Search box.
  3. In the Resulting Google page box, paste in the contents of the address box for the Google Search results page.
  4. In the Specific web page or site box, paste in the contents of the address box after clicking the link to the spam page.
  5. Turn on all the check boxes that apply.
  6. Use the Additional Details box to explain why you consider the result to be spam or what you were looking for and why the page/site doesn’t deliver what you expected.
  7. Click Submit.

It’ll only take a few minutes and, if enough people do this, we can really make a difference.


One Good Reason NOT to Put Google Ads at the Top of a Page

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Google goes down.

Is it possible? As I write this (April 12, 12:03 PM MST), I cannot view any Google content. That includes Google ads on Web sites and the Google Web site itself.

Sites with Google ads prominently placed at the top are extremely slow to load and, when they finally appear, page design may be messed up. Sites that have no Google references are fine.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this happen.

Ah, it’s back. The problem lasted for about 5 minutes. Did anyone else notice? We’ll see.

Fighting Spam — All Kinds

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How I deal with comment and pingback spam.

I start each morning pretty much the same way. I make myself a cup of coffee, make a scrambled egg for my parrot, and then sit down at the kitchen table and check the comments that came into my blog overnight.

About Spam

The main thing I’m checking for each morning is comment and pingback spam. These are similar but different.

  • Comment spam is a comment that exists solely to provide one or more links to another Web site, usually to promote that site or its services, but possibly to just get links to that site to improve Google rankings. Comment spam ads nothing to the site’s value. Sometimes disguised as a guest book entry or general positive comment — for example, “Great blog! I’ll be back!” accompanied by a link or two — it simply isn’t something the average blogger should want on his or her site.
  • Pingback spam is a comment that appears as a result of a link on another blog pinging your blog. Although many pingbacks are legitimate (as many comments are legitimate), there appears to be a rise in pingbacks as a result of feed scraping, which I’ve discussed here and here. Pingback spam is usually pretty easy to spot; the software that scapes the feeds isn’t very creative, so the excerpt is usually an exact quote from what’s been scraped. Sometimes, oddly enough, the quote is from the copyright notice that appears at the bottom of every feed item originating from this site. Pingbacks automate the linking of your site to someone elses — in the case of pingback spam, it’s likely to be a splogger.

Lucky me: I get both.

Tools to Fight Comment Spam

Fortunately, I use both Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2 (many thanks again to Miraz for suggesting both of these), so the spam comments that get through their filters and are actually posted to the site are minimized. On a typical day, I might just have 3 to 5 of them. Compare that to 3,400 potential spam messages stopped by Bad Behavior in the past week and the 51,000 spam messages deleted after posting by Spam Karma in the past year since its installation. Without these two forms of protection, I’d be spending all day cleaning up spam.

Anyone who doesn’t use some kind of spam protection on a blog with open comments is, well, an idiot.

Neither program is very effective against pingback spam, although Spam Karma seems to be catching a few of them these days. Although I’m pretty sure I can set up WordPress to reject pingbacks, I like the idea of getting legitimate links from other blogs. It helps form a community. And it provides a service to my readers. For example, if I wrote an article about something and another blogger quoted my work and added his insight to it, his article might interest my readers. Having a link in my comments right to his related post is a good thing.

My Routine

So my morning routine consists of checking Spam Karma’s “Approved Comments” and marking the comments that are spam as spam. Then I go into WordPress’s Comments screen (Dashboard > Manage > Comments) and marking pingback spam as spam and deleting it.

Why do it both ways? Well, I’m concerned that if I keep telling Spam Karma that pingback spam is spam, it’ll think all pingbacks are spam. I don’t want it to do that. So I manually delete them. It only takes a minute or two, so it isn’t a big deal. If I had hundreds of these a day, I might do things differently.

The other reason I delete the pingbacks manually is because I want to check each site that’s pinging mine. I collect URLs of splogging sites and submit them periodically to Google. These sites violate Google’s Terms of Service and I’m hoping Google will either cancel their AdSense accounts or remove them from Google’s search indexing (or, preferably, both). So I send the links to Google and Google supposedly looks at them.

I’m working on a project to make creating a DMCA notice easier — almost automated — and would love to hear from anyone working on a project like that.

This morning was quiet. Only three spams to kill: one comment spam and two pingback spams. I’ll get a few more spams during the day and kill them as they arrive; WordPress notifies me via e-mail of all comments and pingbacks as they are received. (I don’t check my e-mail at the breakfast table anymore.)

Do you have a special way to deal with comment or pingback spam? Don’t keep it a secret. Leave a Comment below.

More on AdSense Splogs

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Four more pingbacks from feedscrapers today!

After writing my two splogging-related posts this morning, I went for a flight with some clients. Just got back a while ago. And what do I find in my e-mail inbox? Four more splog pingbacks!

I also found a message from Jim Mitchell, responding to an e-mail I’d sent him earlier in the day. He included a link to a blog post on MaxPower that provides two good methods for stopping AdSense sploggers. I’m going through it now. But the thing I wanted to share was this explanation of what splogging is, for those of you who have no idea what I’ve been whining about all day.

From Stopping Adsense Splogs & Spammers: Methods that Work on MaxPower:

Imagine searching for something or other on the Internet and arriving at a webpage chocked full of ads and stuffed with the exact keyword you were searching for. The page is of no help because it contains no content of value. Some guy somewhere, created a website that sucks keywords / newstories / content from other websites using RSS, inserted the right keywords to maximize profit from Adsense, and waited for Google to index and rank it high enough for you stumble upon it. Once at the page, the spammer (or spamdexer) hopes that you will click on one of the Adsense ads that seem helpful compared to the rest of the useless random text. This practice of spamdexing wastes your time, its annoying, and you can fight back.

If you’ve seen this on your blog, follow the above link to the MaxPower article to see what you can do about it.

Reporting Google AdSense Policy Violations

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A follow-up to my “Google, Adsense, and Splogging” post.

Moments after publishing my post about sploggers making money with AdSense, I got three pingbacks from a splogger’s site. I visited the site and saw an AdSense ad block at the top of the page.

Talk about timing!

I went to Google’s site and looked up the info to report violations. I found “Google AdSense Help Center: How do I report a policy violation?“:

How do I report a policy violation?

We regularly review sites in our program for compliance with our program policies. If you notice a site displaying Google ads that you believe is violating our program policies, please let us know and we can investigate the issue further.

The page then goes on to provide instructions making it clear how to report the problem.

Everyone reading this: please use this information to report sites that are scraping your feeds to generate content for their sites. The more we report this, the more likely Google will do something to prevent these people from getting AdSense accounts in the first place. Then maybe — just maybe — this feed scraping will stop.