John Mueller Of Google Can See Search Spam In Languages He Does Not Speak

Google's John Mueller is able to see and identify content search related spam without even speaking the language. Supposedly this is not a magical power or even that hard to do by someone who was trained to catch spam, but nevertheless, he is able to spot spammy content in languages he does not understand.

How do we know this? John Mueller replied to a question on Twitter saying "If it's the site in your profile, it might be worth also getting rid of all the rewritten filler content, if you're trying to make it shine." Well, that site is written completely in Hindi, and while John speaks English, German and probably a couple more languages - he does not speak Hindi.

Sometimes it's worthwhile to check in their help community and get feedback from the folks there, specially for your site. If it's the site in your profile, it might be worth also getting rid of all the rewritten filler content, if you're trying to make it shine...

— 🐝 johnmu.xml (personal) 🐝 (@JohnMu) May 18, 2022

This was then noted by Christoph C. Cemper with this tweet:

JohnMu can "see" that a site in Hindu has all rewritten filler content.

I don't know if he speaks Hindu, but he might have access to some Google tools 😉https://t.co/vYPHlvLddG https://t.co/ck71J3nM0J

— Christoph C. Cemper 🇺🇦 🧡 SEO (@cemper) May 18, 2022

So is this some sort of mystical magical power that John has? John said no, he said there is "no magic necessary" for spotting rewritten filler content in other languages.

Pedro Dias, former Google spam fighter explained that you can use Google Translate and also a trained eye can spot this stuff in languages they do not speak:

I just look at more than the homepage of a website. No magic necessary :-)

— 🐝 johnmu.xml (personal) 🐝 (@JohnMu) May 18, 2022

It's more that if you page back a bit, there are a bunch of English posts.

— 🐝 johnmu.xml (personal) 🐝 (@JohnMu) May 18, 2022

I mean, sometimes you can recognize spam / low-quality-site patterns from 1.6km away, regardless of the language. In that particular case, it's just that once you paged back a month, it was full of English posts. Sometimes you just have to peek behind the curtain :-)

— 🐝 johnmu.xml (personal) 🐝 (@JohnMu) May 19, 2022

I'll just tag this as magic. :)

Forum discussion at Twitter.