Webspam is duplicate, malicious, misleading, or unintelligible web pages designed to harm or confuse visitors and manipulate search results. Webspam is becoming such a widespread problem, that it’s time for the general public to begin fighting back:
- When you see obvious manipulative or harmful web pages, report webspam to Google.
- To report paid links, you must have the URL of the website selling the links and the URL of the website buying links.
- If you still see objectionable content after enabling safesearch, report the URL of offensive content.
- For malware infected sites, report the URL of malicious software.
- For copyright issues, Google will only remove content from another Google service in violation of Google’s terms of service.
- You can request private information be removed from Google search, but the best course of action is contacting the webmaster directly.
- For phishing pages trying to get sensitive information, report the phishing URL.
- For content simply trying to rank higher on Google, click the report webspam button and enter the URL of the page and the search query.
The web would be a safer and more relevant place, if everyone would report junk like:
- Duplicate blog posts streamed from a service to thousands of websites
- How to information that is blatantly wrong
- Unintelligible pages with repeated gibberish
- Competitors obviously manipulating search results