Google & Yahoo, Greg Grothaus & Priyank Garg – What is Spam

In this session two heavyweights of Search, namely Google and Yahoo send members of their search quality teams. Greg and Priyak will be defining what exactly Spam is and how it affects organisations and everyday searches.

What is Google’s definition of spam?

• Anything that violates Google’s quality guidelines
• Making pages designed solely for search engines is moving towards spam territory
• Hidden text or hidden links
• Sneaky redirects or cloaking
• Keyword stuffing
• Duplicate content
• Misleading or deceptive behavior that hurts users
• Avoid link farms, links from bad neighborhoods, deceptive link practices and paid links that are devoid of editorial judgment

Greg mentions users can spam your site by adding comment spam, injected links and hacking your site. Prevent comment spam by using Captcha on your sites, prevent getting hacked by keeping your server’s software up to date.

How does Yahoo deal with spam?

• Very few guidelines are black and white when it comes to dealing with spam
• Yahoo’s goal is to minimize the impact of spammy actions
• Yahoo fights spam with both their algorithm and manually for a holistic spam fighting action
• There is an option to report a spam site in Yahoo Site Explorer

Pretty informative session and was nice to see Google and Yahoo working against a common enemy however during the Q & A when asked if they worked together when a particularly dangerous spamming technique there was a fairly quick brush off of the question followed by a quick no by both Greg and Priyank, seems cooperation between to the two for anything is a non-starter.

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