MATT CUTTS: All right, today's question comes from the Bay
Area in California.
And the question is, just to confirm, does Google take
manual action on webspam?
Does manual action result in removal, or can
it also be a demotion?
Are there are other situations where Google will remove
content from its search results?
So I'm really glad to have a chance to clarify this,
because some people might not know this, although we've
written this quite a bit in various places online.
Google is willing to take manual action to remove spam.
So if you write an algorithm to detect spam, and then
someone searches for their own name, and they find off-topic
porn, they're really unhappy about that.
And they'll write into Google and let us know
that they're unhappy.
And if we write back and say, "Well, we hope in six to nine
months to be able to have an algorithm that catches this
off-topic porn," that's not a really satisfactory answer for
the guy who has off-topic porn showing up for his name.
So in some situations, we are willing to take manual action
on our results.
It's when there are violations of our web spam quality
guidelines.
So if you search for quality guidelines, you'll find a web
page that has all the stuff documented.
And all of the individual stuff hopefully make sense.
It's essentially to avoid deceptive, manipulative,
malicious behavior, the sorts of things that are fooling
search engines, the sorts of things that are causing pages
to be ranked higher than they should be ranked.
And on individual items-- like cloaking, or doorway pages, or
keyword stuffing--
you can often click and get a lot more information,
examples, find out why we don't like things like paid
links, or whatever.
So the answer to your question is, yes, we are willing to
take manual action when we see violations of our quality
guidelines.
Another follow-up question was whether it has to be removal
or whether it can be a demotion.
It can be a demotion.
It tends to be removal, because the spam we see tends
to be very clear-cut.
But there are some cases where you might see cookie cutter
content that's maybe not truly, truly awful, but is
duplicative, or you can find in tons of other places.
And so it's content that is really not a lot of value add,
those sorts of things.
And we say in our guidelines to avoid duplicate content,
whether it's on the same pages, like things like
doorway domains might have duplicate content, whether
it's a cross-domain, so having lots of different domains with
very, very similar or even identical content.
So when we see truly malicious, really bad stuff,
we're often taking action to remove it.
If we see things that are still a violation of our
quality guidelines, but not quite as bad, then you might
see a demotion.
And then the last question was, are there other
situations where Google will remove content
from its search results?
So we do reserve the right to remove content for spam.
Content can be removed for legal reasons, like we might
get a DMCA complaint or some valid court order that says we
have to remove something within
this particular country.
We're also willing to remove stuff for security reasons, so
malware, Trojan horses, viruses, worms,
those sorts of things.
Another example of security might be if you have your own
credit card number on the web.
So those are some of the areas that we are willing to take
action, and we are willing to remove stuff
from our search results.
We don't claim that that's a comprehensive list. We think
that it's important to be able to exercise judgment.
So if there is some safety issue, or of course, things
like child porn, which would fall under legal.
But those are the major areas that we've seen, would be
spam, legal reasons, and security.
And certainly, the vast majority of action that we
take falls under those three broad areas.
But just to be clear, we do reserve the right to take
action, whether it could be demotion or removal.
And we think we have to apply our best judgment.
We want to return the best results that we can for users.
And the action that we take is in service of that, trying to
make sure that we get the best search results we can out to
people when they're doing searches.