Google Quality Raters report leaked

A forty five page, up-to-date Google report has been leaked. It provides updated guidelines for Google’s Quality Raters.

Section four of the report, starting on page 32, discusses “spam”. Google says these are pages designed by webmasters to trick search engine robots and direct traffic to their websites.

Pages generally should NOT be marked Spam if they provide added value. Examples of content that provides added value include:

- Price comparison functionality.
- Product reviews.
- Recipes.
- Lyrics and quotes.
- Contact information, especially physical addresses and phone numbers.
- Coupon, discount and promotion codes.

The document can be found here

http://www.barcelona-webdesing.com/downloads/quality-rater-guidelines.pdf

The most interesting part starts at page 32.

Google gives several pages of examples of what it regards as Webspam. They include fake message boards, fake blogs, fake directories, parked domains, sneaky redirects, keyword stuffing, hidden text, and hidden links. Google explains how to switch off Javascript to see if it is being used to hide text. Horizontal lines or bars can also hide text. Google also knows that CSS can be used hide text.

Spam can also involve scraped content from such sources as Wikipedia, DMOZ and RSS news feeds, combined with PPC ads.

“The important thing to remember,” Google says, “is that if the scraped (copied) content is removed and all that remains is ads, it is Spam.”

Fortunately, if you’re sensible enough to be providing useful, original content, your pages should be regarded as OK.

Are you wondering if any of your pages qualify as “Webspam”? Here’s the test…

“If I remove the copied content, scraped news feeds, fake forums and blogs, thin affiliate links, parked/expired domain links, and all that is left are PPC ads and sponsored links, the page is probably spam.”

good luck!
Team Barcelona