How are spam reports prioritized?

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: We have a good question from Neil M. Hancock in Newcastle. Neil 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 this sorted into any order to be reviewed? The most popular first, for example?” We do order the complaints. Typically, we think about, you know, what’s the impact on the user and so we definitely do, say, if you have a spam complaint and it’s about a site that a lot of the user are going to see that might get more attention than a, you know, a site that almost never gets seen. So we do look at a ton of spam complaints. We do take action on a ton of spam complaints, and we use the spam reports to also help prioritize the next wave or the next iteration of our algorithms and how should they tackle things. But certainly whenever we’re looking at spam complaints that we’re trying to take manual action on we do try to think about, “Okay, how can we best use our resources?” And one of the ways to do that is to look at the complaints about the sites that would most affect users. So, that’s one of the ways that we look at spam complaints.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

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