Another one bites the dust. Google have once again penalised a “Big Name” in business for their website practices. Sprint, who are a global provider of data, voice and internet services, received news of their penalty via Webmaster Tools and instantly took to the Google Webmaster forums for help.

Before we all get carried away wondering what black hat ways a big company is employed to strongarm their way to the top of the SERPs ensuring their dominance, the penalty Sprint received was one relating to user-generated spam and not to any practices Sprint themselves had put in place.

You could chastise Sprint, who are such a large company with quite a large amount of resources, for not preventing this happening in the first place. But then you have to consider that Sprint are a large company with an incredibly large website. Could you manage nearly 5,820,000 without allowing a solitary one to escape without having a proper review? Quite a challenge then.

But Sprint are not alone in this, the BBC have had a run in with Google and received the same penalty. More recently Firefox fell foul to the same thing. The issue with User Generated spam is that Google will let you know there is spam coming from your website, but it won’t tell you where. With web pages in the millions for some of the penalised companies you can imagine the enormity of the task at hand in finding the offending page.

Thankfully though it does seem that Google have found a way penalise individually offending pages if the website itself is not spamming anywhere else. Whilst this is a positive, it can be quite difficult for smaller companies to find the time and resources to audit their whole site to fix what might be causing this penalty. They have to resort to doing what they can and hoping for the best.

Do you think Google should be more specific in the penalties it gives out?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey