When do you report, or not report, spammers?

[Tim Colling]

I would like to ask others here whether or not you report spam by others and if so, what sort of threshold do you apply?

Nobody likes a tattle tale, but when I see my clients' competitors using clearly spammy techniques, my policy is to take action. If it's map spam - and I see a LOT of that - I report it via mapmaker or google maps. If it's other spam I will report it if it's blatant and egregious in scope. For example, I just filed a google spam report regarding the client of a competitor who has a "cities served" list page with sixty links to city doorway pages that are all identical except for the city name.

I just want my clients to have a level playing field, and I want them to be as compliant with Google's quality guidelines as possible - not on moral grounds, but rather, for the sake of not taking unreasonable risks that might expose them to manual or algorithmic penalties.

What do you do?

 

[JoyHawkins]

Tim,

I haven't had too much success reporting things like doorway pages. I've tried it on a few overly spammy sites. I know when it comes to Maps spam, I probably report stuff daily.

I think if it's outranking your client, it's a no-brainer.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

I would like to ask others here whether or not you report spam by others and if so, what sort of threshold do you apply?

Nobody likes a tattle tale, but when I see my clients' competitors using clearly spammy techniques, my policy is to take action. If it's map spam - and I see a LOT of that - I report it via mapmaker or google maps. If it's other spam I will report it if it's blatant and egregious in scope. For example, I just filed a google spam report regarding the client of a competitor who has a "cities served" list page with sixty links to city doorway pages that are all identical except for the city name.

I just want my clients to have a level playing field, and I want them to be as compliant with Google's quality guidelines as possible - not on moral grounds, but rather, for the sake of not taking unreasonable risks that might expose them to manual or algorithmic penalties.

What do you do?

I think I'm in the minority here but I don't report it. I don't really want to be responsible for people losing their jobs because their boss or marketing department was spammy or agreed to spam and now they have no work because their company dropped out of maps. That's just me. Plus, I like a good challenge.

At any rate, you should do what you think is best and don't worry about what others are doing. I don't think it's wrong to report spammers. In fact, I have no problem with it and I understand exactly why others do. I just haven't decided to do so yet. The day may come, who knows!

Again, follow your own compass and be satisfied with it