Google May Increase Enforcement On User Generated Content Spam With Penalties?

The other week, Google posted a fresh blog post named prevent portions of your site from being abused by spam. The advice was not too far off from the advice the company published in 2017. So why publish this new advice again? I asked John Mueller of Google if we can expect an increase in enforcement through manual actions but I did not really hear back.

Keep in mind, Google has been sending out fewer and fewer manual actions over the years, despite there being more and more spam on the internet. Maybe Google is going to tackle most of the user generated content issues algorithmically? Maybe Google does already. But all we know right now is that Google just published an article named prevent portions of your site from being abused by spam.

I asked Google outright, is this some sort of warning, are they putting us on notice, that Google will crack down on these behaviors?

@JohnMu is this some sort of notice or warning that Google may go after comment or UGC spam? Or is this just a help article with nothing coming down the pike. https://t.co/xEw6gzaL0R

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) May 27, 2021

I asked again and John said he will look into it:

I'll check :)

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 27, 2021

John said this is not new :)

These aren't new kinds of manual actions. Sometimes we just notice that certain kinds of spam are more popular again, and then it's good to help folks with additional details. Having a site misused by spammers is super-annoying :-/

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 28, 2021

Google has been penalizing sites over UGC related issues for years, even companies as big as Sprint and Mozilla.

So yes, I know that but still:

Last time I covered one of these types of posts and said maybe google is warning us of something coming with manual actions, you guys said no. That’s not happening. Trying to be proactive here in some of my reporting.

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) May 28, 2021

In any event, I am a bit concerned now that you may see a spike in action, either algorithmically or manually around UGC related issues. So make sure to follow the steps Google outlined in its blog post, it is just good practice anyway.

Forum discussion at Twitter.