If you're watching this video, you probably want to learn more about user generated spam, most likely because you got a message in the free Web Master 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 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 spamming user profiles.
So somebody will make a user that claims to have the name, discount, car insurance 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 maybe you have a blog and you left the comments where the comments have really gotten spammed out of control.
Or, in theory, you might have a guest book 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 guest book. In theory, it could be something like 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, okay, 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 form.
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 form 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 people who are just dropping spammy links one after the other.
So what should you do if you get this 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 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, your domain and you can search for the PPC, the porn, the pills, the casinos, all the sorts of things that people would normally complain about or or that you'd see spam for.
So that's a good way to clean it up.
Then you want to ask yourself, how do I keep the spammers from coming back?
And so you want to do a little bit of preventive maintenance.
Some of the things that I would recommend are trying to put a capture on your system.
Now be aware that a lot of forums use very simple captures, and some software that is used for spamming can actually solve a few of those captures.
So you might consider using I think Google has recaptured there's other various captures.
There's even a kitten capture.
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, okay, put a no follow on the user generated links, or if you want to 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 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 guest book, 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 spam user profile.
They might not even leave threads on your forum, but you might still have spam user profile, 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 ideally try to make sure that it doesn't happen again.
So maybe I closed it for new users, or I require some authentication, or I've added a capture, something that ideally helps us understand that it's not just going to 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, and that normally it's the newer sort of stuff, 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.