Google's John Mueller admitted on Twitter that for user generated content (UGC) sites, spam is a hard issue and problem.
John wrote, "spam is a hard problem for sites that focus on UGC; keeping spammers out & keeping things easy is tough."
We know both Mozilla and Sprint had small Google penalties around user generated content on their sites. One of the reasons I killed my forum was it was too much spam to deal with (have enough of that in the comments here) and Google has given advice over the years on how to handle it.
John from Google, although, admits it is a hard problem to tackle.
@jamesr990 @cognitiveSEO @aleyda spam is a hard problem for sites that focus on UGC; keeping spammers out & keeping things easy is tough.
— John Mueller (@JohnMu) October 13, 2014
Here are some stories we have on this problem:
- Google's SEO Advice On Maintaining A Discussion Forum
- Can User Generated Comments Cause A Google Penalty
- Google's Take On User Generated Content & Quality
- User Generate Content Does Not Mean Spam
- Google: Comment Spam Can Hurt Your Site's Ranking
- Google's Publisher Quality Enforcer On User Generated Content & AdSense
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Image credit to BigStockPhoto for social image