Google Hits Mozilla with Spam Penalty over User Generated Content
Mozilla, a non-profit software organization was hit by Google’s manual webspam penalties, as a consequence of letting user-generated content on the sites. Christopher More, web production manager shared the message they had received in Google’s Webmaster forums. It read, “Google has detected user-generated spam on your site. Typically, this kind of spam is found on forum pages, guestbook pages, or in user profiles. As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to your site.” More also added that he was unable to find any such content.
On the other hand, John Mueller spokesperson from Google replied by mentioning that there are chances that the pages have been eliminated from the SERPs. He gave a further explanation mentioning that these penalties are granular in nature and thus will be limited to the spam pages and subdomains only. Thus, the main site of Mozilla is left unaffected.
It’s no secret that spam content is penalized by Google.
According to what Mueller said, it is only those blog comments which “look particularly bad”, and that can be a trouble for the Webmasters. On a concluding note, he added certain useful tips for sites, which face penalties of the same nature. They are,
- Community members must be allowed to flag spam.
- Rel=nofollow is to be used across all blog comments.
The chief of Google’s Webspam wing, Matt Cutts, later joined in the discussion. He went on to explain that the penalization was brought upon those URLs, which quite surprisingly contain 12 megabytes of spam throughout 21.169 comments.
Other Instances of Penalties
It is not new for Google to make a high profile software organization subject to its spam penalties. Prior to this BBC had asked Google for its assistance since it had received unnatural link warnings from the search engine and hadn’t a single clue about where these links could have generated from. Google on its part got back to BBC replying that the penalty was granular in nature and was made against only single articles that were found unacceptable.
However, for all websites haven’t received such lenient treatment. Of several examples, one must mention the penalty that Interflora faced in February for its paid links. It was out of ranks for 11 days consecutively and naturally, numerous clients were lost. It was huge business blow.
The senior developer at the Eword, Mr. Adrian Mursec comments, “As Google becomes more transparent in its spam penalties and discusses it in the public arena, webmasters have the chance to learn from the mistakes of others. It’s clear that blog comment spam won’t be tolerated, so it’s vital that webmasters take action against it; of course, this will benefit the user experience as well.”
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