" We sent more than 4.3 million messages to webmasters to notify them of manual actions we took on their site and to help them identify the issues. "
versus
" More than 400, 000 spam reports were submitted by users around the world. After prioritizing the reports, we acted on 65% of them, and considered 80% of those acted upon to be spam. "
So spam-reports are a waste of time??
Federico Sasso
> So spam-reports are a waste of time?
Not necessarily:
According to the second sentence there is a 52% chance the submitted spam report would be considered spam and penalized:
400.000 x .65 x .80 = 400.000 x .52 = 208.000
I occasionally submitted some in the past. I never observed any changes but that was in the short run, may be it could take a year to only be considered.
The first sentence puzzles me more. Why?
4.300.000 / 365 = ~12.000 penalties / day
Those are just the committed manual penalties, but I suppose manual reviews are triggered by a greater number of web spam reports and algo detections. Let`s suppose false positives are just roughly the same amount (50% false positives); that would make ~24.000 instances to be checked manually per day.
How many people are powering the web spam team? Those numbers are meant worldwide, and you need a native speaker to evaluate many cases. According to Matt Cutts in 2012, they have a team in US and one based in Dublin manned by "lots of people able to tackle a large variety of languages", and they also leverage employees based abroad.
So let`s suppose there are about 300-500 Google employees worldwide (yes, this guess is a shot in the dark) working daily on web spam.
Let`s also pretend they are poor minions with no leave days, no weekends, who work 365 days a year.
It would mean each of them evaluated roughly 48-80 cases per day. They are poor minions we said, and work 12h per day, with no lunch or pee pauses, so they can allot for each case 6-15 minutes to evaluate and commit in half of the cases the manual penalty. Coordinating takes time: they have to distribute each case by language and competence.
Well, they also have to save some time to evaluate all the reconsideration requests queueing up. So let`s say they have about 5 minutes per instances.
Am I the only one suspecting there`s a huge danger of "collateral damages"??
How we fought webspam in 2015
