Yesterday we broke the news that Google has penalized Mozilla for user generated spam and we did say it was a granular penalty but we didn't know how granular until today.
It turns out, the penalty was on one specific page. Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts, said in the Google Webmaster Help thread that the penalty was only applied to one page. Which page? blog.mozilla.org/respindola/about. Yep, just one page - all that over one page?
Well, it turns out that the reason Google penalized that page was because there was not just a little bit of spam, there was 12 megabytes of spam from 21,169 different comments. Matt said that those types of pages cause a lot of "users complain to us about" and thus they decided to "take action" against that specific page.
Now, wouldn't it be nice if Google just told Mozilla it was specific to one page? Heck, John Mueller made it sound like, although it was granular, it was throughout much of the site and a lot had to be addressed. Of course, there was spam all over the site and it should be addressed but this penalty was only on one page.
That being said, this shows how much user generated spam there has to be on a single page for Google to warrant to take action. 12 megabytes of spam from almost 22,000 different comments is a heck of a lot of spam. Mozilla, take control of your site!
Forum discussion continued at Google Webmaster Help.
Image credit to BigStockPhoto for cute zombie
