Google’s Matt Cutts has said time and time again that Google wants to create a better web experience for users – and this involves giving preferential ranking to high-quality website content. Now, the company has updated its spam report, which means white-hat SEO marketing efforts are more important than ever.
Cutts announced the update last night in a Tweet, saying, “We just released the biggest refresh of our spam report form in, oh, say 10 years.” The new webspam report asks users to specify the problem they’ve encountered, and it offers different forms (and information) for different problems.
The former webspam report asked users to simply check boxes addressing pertinent issue, including “hidden text or links” and “misleading redirects.” The updated form more closely examines the problems with (potential) spam pages. Users can click on links and in some cases (such as reporting sites with “Objectionable content”), they’ll get a breakdown of Google’s guidelines related to the issue to better determine whether or not the page is spam. In other cases (such as reporting sites for “Paid links” or “Copyright and other legal issues”), they’ll be guided through individual processes to report these types of spam.
The update should remind marketers that the search giant is cracking down on quality standards and what constitutes SEO. As the search engine optimization market evolves with new search and social updates, marketers should consider that 86 percent of companies will invest in SEO this year and more than one in 10 marketers will be investing 91 to 100 percent of their SEO marketing budgets with expert agencies.
