How are spam reports prioritized?

Neil M Hancock from Newcastle asks:

"Is there a minimum number of spam complaints about a domain and/or SERP before Google reviews the complaint? Presumably you get thousands of spam complaints daily, are these sorted into any order to be reviewed? The most popular first?"

This video is part of a "Grab Bag" series in which Matt Cutts, head of Google's webspam team, answers questions from webmasters. We're not currently taking new video questions, so your best bet for getting an answer about webmaster-related search issues is to head to our help forum: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google
• spam
• reports
• webspam

[keepingitreal10]

Their recent activity show these users spamming youtube

damen1231

aimeemontemayorhpul

PoseripTalajy

[DadsonFireORG]

Matt, goodness please, many competitors google bowl us, and we are out of business because for some reason google thinks viagra sites or whatever sites google bowlers do to us are our fault. We can not control the attacks on us please Mattt we need food in our mouths we dont get paid vacations and health insurance we are trying matt please help us be straight forward please stop google bowling, and simply give us a clear roadmap if we did something wrong we are not rich, we are struggling.

[MundoWeekend]

Mi dominio, se encuentra en listas negras de spam, no sabemos como ha podido suceder esto porque nosotros no somos spammers, pero en cualquier caso ¿alguien sabría decirme como salir de estas listas por favor?. Gracias.

My domine is in a black list, we don´t know how have occur that because we are not a spammers. (may any person to tell us how can we go out of those lists?..Thank you.

[incrediblehelp]

How can I submit a question Matt?

[blackturtleshow]

Is there a procedure to deal with bogus spam complaints? That is, I'm sure spam complaints are sometimes used in an attempt to get the website of a competitor demoted. This would be analogous to false flagging on YouTube.

[glt1978]

Just an idea, what about using the price for the adword ad for the keyword reported as a filtering mechanism? The pricey ones are often what spammers attack.

[AmeVar]

This makes sense, Google is interested in serving their users, so of course they have to prioritise in order of 'most popular' site because those are the sites their users will visit more often.

Google must get gazillions of complaints every day so, it stands to reason that they need to prioritise them in some order. It may seem unfair to 'the little guy' but that's just the way of the world really...

[almightyvegeta87]

Popular sites comes first when dealing with spam.

A site owner does not know if his site has been reported.

[larssonk22]

How do know if your site has received a complaint?

[fabioricotta]

How do you know the sites that most affect the users? Using GA data, CTR on SERPs, or both?