>>Matt: If you're watching this video you probably wanna learn more about user generated
spam. Most likely because you got a message in the free Webmaster Tools, Webmaster console
that we provide that says "We think your site might have user generated spam."
So what does it mean? How do you deal with it? What are some ways to prevent it? Let's
talk through it a little bit.
Typically, user generated spam would be, for example, if you're running a forum. And that
forum, maybe you weren't paying as much attention to it. It can get overrun with spammers leaving
a whole bunch of spammy comments. Another common thing we'll see is spammy user profiles.
So somebody will make a user that claims to have the name DiscountCarInsurance or something
like that.
And if you look at your list of profiles and users, you'll see a whole lot of those kinds
of users. Those are the most typical cases. But it can be, you know, maybe you have blog.
And you left the comments. Where the comments have really gotten spammed out of control.
Or in theory, you might have a guestbook. And you haven't maintained that guestbook
at all. You haven't looked at it since 2007 maybe. And so there's a whole lot of spammy
comments on the guestbook.
In theory, it could be something like, you know, somebody hacked your content. But normally
that's a different message. Primarily the reason why you'll get user generated spam
is, you have a forum or some part of your site where users can leave comments or maybe
drop links. And it's basically gotten overrun because it hasn’t been maintained.
Now, the good thing is, normally when you see this sort of message, it means that the
manual action that we've taken is pretty precisely scoped. If possible, we try to avoid taking
action on the whole domain. We might say something like "OK, don't trust this forum. Or don't
trust this part of the site." And that's kind of nice.
Because it doesn't affect the primary part of your site. As long as your site is high
quality. It might just affect your forum. So that's how we try to do it. Unless we see
so many different parts of the site that have been defaced. Or that have been overrun that
we end up taking action on the entire site.
So a simple example might be, maybe you're a basketball fan. So you have a forum about
the Kentucky Wildcats. And you set it up a few years ago. And you haven't gone back to
check that often. And you come back and you realize, there's all kinds of bad content
there. You know, people who are just dropping spammy links one after the other.
So what should you do if you get his message? Well, first and foremost, clean it up. You
might look at new users that have been created. You might try to make sure that any of those
who are spammy, you just go ahead and kick them out of your system. Any threads or parts
of your forum that are basically spammy, just go ahead and delete those threads. So more
or less, try to renovate or clean up or rejuvenate your site. So that people landing on your
site just won't randomly be landing on a spammy page anymore.
I would recommend doing site searches. So you can do site, colon, your search, uh, your
domain. And you can search for the PPC. You know, the porn, the pills, the casinos. All
the sorts of things that people would normally complain about. Or that you'd see spam for.
So that's a good way to clean it up. Then you wanna ask yourself, "How do I keep the
spammers from coming back?" And so you wanna do a little bit of preventative maintenance.
Some of the things that I would recommend are trying to put a captcha on your system.
Now be aware that a lot of forums use very simple captchas. And some software that is
used for spamming can actually solve a few of those captchas. So you might consider using,
I think Google has re-captcha. So there's other various captchas. There's even a kitten
captcha. Basically you want it to be something that takes a real person a little bit of time
to solve. That you can't just automatically solve using OCR or something like that.
You might also consider turning comment moderation on. So that people can't get that immediate
gratification of leaving a spam comment and immediately getting a link. You definitely
don't want those links to pass page rank automatically. So, you can either say, "OK, put a no-follow
on the user generated links." Or if you wanna be nuanced. And if you've got the time for
this, you can say maybe newer or not as trusted users get "no follow" and then after someone
has been a valuable member of the community. Or they've edited the wiki, and you know,
they've done a lot of edits in a good way. They don't look like they're spamming it,
then you could let those links pass page rank.
So there's a lot of ways that you can kind of prevent your forum or your blog. Your guestbook
or whatever from being spammed.
But if you've gotten this message, the number one thing to do is to try to correct it. Try
to remove any of that content. Especially the spammy user profiles. They might not even
leave threads on your forum. But you might still have spammy user profiles. So do pay
attention to that.
And then do a reconsideration request. And basically try to tell us what was the situation.
Give some context. Document what happened. And try to tell us how you'll ideally try
to make sure that that doesn't happen again. So maybe, "I closed it for new users." Or
"I require some authentication." Or "I've added a captcha." Something that ideally helps
us understand that it's not just gonna become spammed all over again.
So that's the basics. It's normally some work to do. But it's not like a huge amount of
work. In that normally it's the newer sort of stuff. It's the stuff that's happened recently.
And you can usually tell. Because it's not as if the spammers are all that subtle. So,
hope that helps.
That's just a little bit of context. And when you're done, hopefully when you do a reconsideration
request, things go well after that.