Does Google Only Fight English-Language Web Spam?
If your website or blog site predominately caters to an English-speaking audience, it is all too easy to forget that the rest of the world – at least the portions with internet access – use Google and other various search engines too search for information.
However, does Google, too, forget about its millions of users throughout the entire world that do not speak English? In a single word, hardly, according to a new video that was published by Matt Cutts, Google’s chief of webspam (or more accurately, fighting and preventing webspam).
Cutts’ video came as a response to a question from an anonymous user in Mountain View, CA:
“Is the webspam team taking the same measures to counter spam in international markets like India like they do in the US market? It just seems like there are a lot of junk sites that come up in the first page of results when searching on google.co.in.”
Cutts says that both of Google’s webspam teams, including the one focused on fighting web spam with algorithms and the one that fights webspam through manual interventions, are fully engaged in countering webspam internationally. He says that Google tries to design their algorithms, whether they’re intended for seeking out link spamming, keyword stuffing or any other blackhat SEO techniques, to work in as many languages as possible, not just English. This is true for Google’s manual webspam team too, which takes manual action against web spammers in about 40 different languages, according to Cutts.
At the same time, Cutts explains that English-language search results with a .com domain suffix tend to get the most attention overall from Google’s webspam team, simply because more members of their team speak English than German, French, Italian or any other language. In the big picture, this makes sense anyhow given that English is the most popular language spoken by Google’s audience, and the simple fact that despite its international aspirations, Google is still an American company.
The full video can be viewed below:
