A few days ago, Matt posted a request on his blog for people to file spam reports, especially for keyword stuffing and Asian spam sites. After reading that, I had a chat with another webmaster friend who thought spam reports were useless. Her point was that spammers injected hundreds of new spam domains every day, and reporting each one, even if Google acted on those reports, was a waste of time. Her business also doesn’t rely much on Google traffic, so that does skew her perspective a bit.
On the other hand, I file spam reports often. I think spam reports are useful and they’ve worked in the past to knock out hundreds of domains. The dissatisfied? link can be used to report spam in batch mode. I also hardly doubt Google just takes spam reports, verifies them, then black list individual sites. I’m sure they’re taking note of spam tactics used to improve their spam filters.
Anyway, a few days after Matt posted the request on his blog, there are over 60 replies on it. Most are your average gripes and views like “spamming is bad”, “adsense created spam”, etc. Still, here’s a list of some comments that stuck out in my mind:

Google does absoluetly nothing against hidden noscript content (or content in hidden divs). I reported about 5 examples to Google and Matt about hidden div spam ages ago and nothing was done, so now I do it on all my sites and am making an absolute killing. I’ll keep doing it until I see the original spammer I reported get axed (that’s www.ambergreeninternetmarketing.com and its clients).

I admit after reading that I wanted to see a concrete example to test out on this site.
Rawalex adds:

Harith, the response time between “spam in the index” and “spam removed from index” is very critical to how profitable spamming can be.

PhilC writes:

If I ran a search engine, and I wanted to deal with spam, I definitely wouldn’t remove sites that were reported as spamming. I’d want to write algos that would deal with them, and others that contain the same sort of spam, and I’d want them in the index so that I could see if the algos worked.

This line made me chuckle:

You’re sending Matt unsolicited job offers through spam reports? That’s sort of ironic isn’t it?

Does Google?s Spam Reports Work? - Read More...