How to Report Spam

    After all this discussion on search engine spam and Black Hat SEO techniques, what should you do if you come across sites that contain such problems? Before you find out your options on spam reporting, keep in mind how this can also help you with your own SEO efforts.

    If you happen to check out the site of your competitor, and you notice some unconventional techniques being employed, be sure you report that to your search engine immediately. For one thing, if your competitor site gets penalized, you don’t have to worry about them hindering your own SEO campaign, right?

    For Google, if you make a search query and you land on a site that has doorway pages, hidden links or hidden text, or even chock full of unnecessary keywords, you can file your spam report at this link: http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html.

    When you file a report, you have to copy and paste the exact Google URL where you found the faulty site listed. Aside from that, you should copy and paste the link of the site which you want to report for spam. There are checkboxes provided for you to indicate which type of spam was found.

    For Yahoo spam reporting, you can access their page at this link: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/spam_abuse.html. You will need to enter your email address as additional information when reporting spam. Like in Google, you have to provide the URL of the page that has spam, and the URL of the Yahoo results page where you found it. Also, you must indicate what keywords you used when you typed in your search query, which is also a requirement when reporting spam abuse in Google.