Google Hits Mozilla With Spam Penalty

Have user generated content on your site? Pay attention to what those users are doing. That’s the takeaway from Google hitting Mozilla with a spam penalty this week, along with another takeaway. Despite Google’s saying it’s being more transparent about spam actions, people clearly find it hard to know what they’re in trouble for.

Mozilla Gets A Penalty

Search Engine Roundtable spotted the latest flare-up in Google’s fight against spam. Chris More, the Web production manager for Mozilla, took to Google’s forums for help in dealing with the penalty notice he received. From his post:

We got this message from Google and I have verified it in the webmaster tools: Google has detected user-generated spam on your site. Typically, this kind of spam is found on forum pages, guestbook pages, or in user profiles.
As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to your site.
I am unable to find any spam on http://www.mozilla.org. I have tried a site:www.mozilla.org [spam terms] and nothing is showing up on the domain. I did find a spammy page on a old version of the website, but that is 301 redirected to an archive website.
Has anyone had luck finding out what pages Google feels contain user-generated spam? We don’t even have a database on www.mozilla.org to allow the creation of user-generated content!

ut 12 hours after his post, More got an answer from Google webmaster trends analyst John Mueller. Mueller’s position involves outreach to webmasters on a range of Google search issues. He wrote:

To some extent, we will manually remove any particularly egregious spam from our search results that we find, so some of those pages may not be directly visible in Google’s web-search anymore.

In summary, Google told Mozilla that it has some type of spam issue that was so bad as to generate a penalty. But, Google didn’t explain what exactly this spam was, so that it could be easily removed. Worse, Google may have already removed some of the spam from its own listings, so that a publisher like Mozilla can’t even locate it using Google search.
Not only does this sound crazy, but it also sounds familiar. Last month, the BBC received a similar warning, one about having unnatural links. A puzzled BBC rep took to the forums to ask for help, since the message didn’t explain more in detail and the site has so much content. Eventually, Mueller answered that the warning came from having one single page that was deemed having unnatural links pointing at it and that “granular” action was taken.