Can someone hurt my site by submitting a Spam Report?
Posted by John Honeck on March 14th, 2007
It has been suggested many places that all someone (a competitor) needs to do is submit several spam reports on your site and you will be deindexed by Google.
While it seems unlikely that it would be just this easy to harm someone Else’s site, we look to Adam Lasnik as the ulitmate authority on the subject, and the answer is NO.
Spamfighting does not factor in a “popularity of the commons” scheme
whereby if [x] people vote a site off the Google Island, it is
ceremoniously dumped into /dev/null.Put more directly: Having someone (or even 42 MILLION people) report a
site as spam will not change how we view a site. Our spam report,
rather, helps us to become aware of pages violating our guidelines that
we might not yet have crawled… enabling us to have another datapoint
in our search quality efforts.
However, consider this, if your site is indeed SPAM and Google tweaks it’s resources to identify as such, then of course your site could be removed. But be rest assured that even if they submit it as SPAM 42 Million times and it’s not spam that will cause it to be removed.
To file a spam report you’ve got two methods available, the Anonymous Google Spam Report or for a more authoritative spam report, log into Webmaster Tools and Report SPAM under the Tools.
March 20th, 2007 at 3:48 am
[...] Can someone hurt my site by submitting a Spam Report? [...]
May 21st, 2007 at 3:32 pm
I think there is a misprinting in the following sentense:
But be rest assured that even if they submit it as SPAM 42 Million times and it’s not spam that will cause it to be removed.
It should be ended like this:
…and it’s not spam that will not cause it to be removed.
February 29th, 2008 at 10:54 am
If you notice competitors using black hat techniques, spammy or otherwise, it is good to report them IMO. People should be encouraged to use good web design and SEO practices… if more websites got banned as a result of bad practises, it will encourage them to play nice.