Yesterday in the Google Hangout at the 21:05 mark into the video, John Mueller said Google does not manually review all spam reports.
Question: We filed a spam report some time ago but I haven’t seen any change. Does every report get manually checked?
Answer: No. We don’t manually review all spam reports.
I honestly thought Google did review all spam reports. At least I think we reported that a year ago and the speed of review was pretty quick. But now John is saying now, they do not manually review all spam reports.
Here is the transcript:
No. We don’t manually review all spam reports.This is something where we try to figure out which spam reports have the biggest impact and those are the ones we focus on and those are the ones the web spam team would then manually review and process and perhaps take manual action on. And most of the other ones that we see tend to be things that we can collect over time and that we can use to improve our algorithms over time.
So that is usually where we think the more value out of these spam reports. In the sense of instead of taking action on just one page that is doing something wrong and doing that manually and kind of following through with that page that was reported, if we can take that information and apply it to a whole bunch of pages or the rest of the internet and really recognize these issues a little bit more in an automated way then suddenly that small spam report has a lot of value.
But that is not something you would see from one day to the next. That is something usually takes quite a bit of time for us to actually go through those and to make sure that based on these reports we’ve seen, where algorithmically handling this type of spam or this type of abuse or this type of issue, across the whole web in a bit of a better way.
So that might be what you are kind of seeing there.
Forum discussion at Google+.
This post was scheduled to go live today but was written earlier - I am currently offline today.
