Google seems to consider paid links and webspam reporting a very essential tool in its constant effort to evolve their existing algo. Like last year in June, Google based on user feedback had come out with Paid Links Reporting Form that enabled the users to report paid links. Now, through Google Webmaster Central Blog, Google explains the importance of User Feedback in the first part of this two part series and the impact it made on Google's Paid Link Reporting Form and Webspam.

Reporting Paid Links:

Because of the 'Reporting Paid Links' service, Google had received thousands and thousands of user reported paid link reports to Google and each report probably contained multiple websites that were suspected of selling links. These reports were constantly scrutinized by Google and the user feedback had also been extremely helpful in improving its Search Algorithms. According to Reid Yokoyama (Search Quality), “We also are willing to take manual action on a significant fraction of paid link reports as we continue to improve our algorithms. More importantly, the hard work of users who have already reported paid links has helped improve the quality of our index for millions.”

Reporting Webspam:

Since the introduction of spam report form in November, 2001, Google received hundreds spam reports each day via either the 'authenticated form' that requires authentication from the Google Webmaster Tools or from the 'unauthenticated form'. Last month, when Google had provided some really interesting insight into Google Search Quality, it also shared the fact that in the year 2007, more than 450 new improvements were made to its search algorithms. Reid further added, “A number of those improvements were related to webspam. It's not an understatement to say that users who have taken the time to report spam were essential to many of those algorithmic enhancements.”

Seems that the Paid Links and Webspam reporting has really paid off for Google. Now only if they can act little more quickly on these complaints!

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