What are some of the projects that the webspam team might tackle in 2011?

Matt's answer:

Hello, it’s time for another webmaster video question session, and today’s question comes from me. I seated the moderator page with a few questions, like what are some of the projects that the web spam team might tackle in 2011? And that actually got 40 or 50 votes. So I thought I’d go ahead and give a quick preview of the sorts of things we’re thinking about for 2011. One of the big ones is sort of a back to basics. We had been working on a bunch of different projects, and we’re sort of coming back to work on what a lot of people would consider the core spam. The keyword stuffing, the blog comments spam that people see on the web and don’t really want to show up in their search results pages. So back to basics, in my mind, means a lot more engineers working on stuff that people will easily recognize as spam. We’ve got a content based spam classifier that we’ll be rolling out, and people may see the impact of that, for example. We’re also going to, of course, continue our projects looking at the quality of links. So that’s one big emphasis. Another one is hack sites. We’re going to keep working on that. And a third one is communication. So, trying to figure out how better to talk to web masters, and ways where they can figure out what’s going on with their site. Ideally ways that they can submit a reconsideration request and get a little bit more information back. The problem is, the web spam team, relative to the number of sites on the web, is very small. And so how do you communicate in a scalable way? How do you let people know what’s going on with their site in a way that they understand, that gives them something actionable to do? So for example, with hacked sites, we’ve just started to show a little message in our Google web server that says this site may be compromised. And if you click on it, it’ll take you to a little bit more help information about if we think your site’s been hacked, here are some of the things that you can do. So we’re looking at the full spectrum of ways to communicate better. Not only when we think something’s going on with your site, but when you also want to submit a reconsideration request. Along with that, we’ll continue to work on improving our detection of things like hacked sites. And then we’re going to have this emphasis on back to the basics. We’re going to try to figure out, OK, what are the things that an average person is more likely to hit, that they can realize it’s web spam? Whether it be visible stuff, or things in the back links. And just continue to try to execute on that, and make sure that we continue to make the results as spam free as possible.

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

Original video: