With Google’s Penguin 2.0 update almost a week old many web masters and marketers have noticed some significant changes to their search results. Most experts agree that the update has been an overall positive thing with many of the low quality sites being knocked down in the rankings, making room for sites which provide true value to customers. Google’s Matt Cutts, however, acknowledged that the update did not find all the spammy sites on the net, and he is asking for your help.
He tweeted about the Penguin Spam Report page which allows Google users to report pages which are still coming up in the search results that really should not be. The goal, of course, is to alert Google to these sites so they can take a closer look and take action if necessary. The way the process will work is unclear at this point. Whether it will be a manual review process for Google or if this page simply submits the information to the Penguin 2.0 system to see if it raises any red flags was not discussed.
The page which allows people to report sites which they believe don’t belong in Google’s results pages asks for things like the URL of the page in question, the URL of the search results which displayed the page and other information about the situation. It is then submitted to Google for them to take it from there.
This is an interesting approach by Google, and if done right it may help them to further improve the results they are able to provide to their customers. One fear some marketers will undoubtedly have is that rivals will simply submit their site through some sort of proxy or other service in an attempt to have them ‘punished by the penguin’ though most people are confident that Google will have some sort of protection in place to prevent this from taking place.
What about you? If you find a spam site in the SERPs would you report it to Google? Seems like a lot of work for most web browsers to take on. It will be interesting to learn any additional details about how this process will work in the coming weeks.
