Originally Posted by smeagain

Yes, a Spam Report can trigger a manual review, but I believe they have a more targetted spider to filter out the reported sites before expensive manual reviews are carried out. There is also good reason to believe that a manual review can be triggered by routine spider visits if some parrameters/boundaries are crossed.

Makes sense. Are you saying that manual reports may be ignored if a site scores well on filter algos. Maybe they would ignore some types but others (like selling blog posts) may still need manual reviews.

most of googles stuff is done algorithmically. they have always preferred to fight from a distanmce rather than hand to hand. My guess is that they have a little algo that checks the reported sites for tell tale signs of wrong doing ie. blocks of text all linking out to various site. Small text in the footer with out bound links on. Someone on this forum posted the other day that it is ridiculous my posting this, when some of my own sites do this very thing, and that i should practice what I preach! before someone smart arse does that again, I will answer the question before it is asked. I DO run things like this across test sites, I do a LOT of SEO testing, as do most decent SEO's. I have various test sites that I use that, if banned, would mean I learn from it.

Yes OWG, we're on the same wavelength.

Smea when you made your post I thought the same that we are more or less in agreement on this. This is difference between learning froma forum what must be done to rank, and understanding what to do. I am good at what I do because of future proofing sites by understanding what technologies are up and coming, and what the search engines are likely to be doing next.

Originally Posted by arora

Please remember "with knowledge comes responsibility"

Uncle Ben said it was with great power comes great responsibility

Yes OWG, second Geussing the next weapon that the SEs are going to use in their fight against Spam is one of the most vital bits of SEO that New SEOs don't seem to consider. To this end, I alocate some time once a month to search the US Patents Office. If Google for instance intends to trial a new feature in it's Algo, it will usually Patent the concept if it is "New and Novel". If I see something that points to a new slant on an Algo within the Patents Office, I incorporate something into a page or 2 then watch it for months and months.

PS:
These Patents are frequently not registered in the Search Engines name (because of people like me) they are often registered in the name of a Senior Exec So you need to keep up to date with the Top Level of company structure.