Google has posted that it may now use your search spam reports for manual actions and that the text used in those spam reports may be sent along “verbatim” to the site owner being reported.
What Google said. Google wrote it has “Clarified that Google may use spam report submissions to take manual action against violations.”
The new text says:
“Ranking manipulation techniques that attempt to compromise the quality of Google’s search results violate our spam policies and can negatively impact a site’s ranking. Google may use your report to take manual action against violations. If we issue a manual action, we send whatever you write in the submission report verbatim to the site owner to help them understand the context of the manual action. We don’t include any other identifying information when we notify the site owner; as long as you avoid including personal information in the open text field, the report remains anonymous.”
Spam reports used for manual actions. Google seemed to make it sound like this is just a clarification and that Google may use the spam reports for manual actions. This seems like a change to its previous communication that Google does not use spam reports for manual actions.
So this seems like more than a clarification to me.
Your spam report text sent along. Google also said it can and may likely sent the text you put in the spam report and pass it directly to the site owner. Google wrote, “send whatever you write in the submission report verbatim to the site owner to help them understand the context of the manual action. We don’t include any other identifying information when we notify the site owner; as long as you avoid including personal information in the open text field, the report remains anonymous.”
Google warns you not to include any personal information or other infomration you do not want that site owner to know or have.
Why we care. This does seem like a big change to how Google handles spam reports from previous years. If you do submit spam reports, you should be aware of these changes and adjust any reports as you see fit going forward.