750,000 pv/month due to webspam. What to do?

[mcglynn]

Let's say your user-generated content strategy is wildly successful, in a slightly twisted sense: webspammers fill it with online streaming sports teasers and the promise of "Weeds season 7 episode 11." As a result of hard SEO work done to build the profile of the domain, these webspam pages seem to rank well in Google, and deliver nearly 750k pageviews, and many many unique visitors, to the site every month.

The ad-sales team loves the traffic boost. Overall traffic, uniques, and search numbers look rosy.

What do you do?

a) let it ride

b) throw away roughly half your search traffic overnight by deleting all the spam and tightening the controls to prevent spammers from continuing to abuse the site

There are middle-ground solutions, like using NOINDEX more liberally on UGC pages, but the end result is the same as option (b) even if it takes longer to get there.

[RyanKent]

The problem you face is by allowing spam, your real users will be unhappy. Your main site visitors may leave your site for another, spam-free site. It is likely you have already permanently lost some traffic due to the spam.

Presently you describe your site as 50% spam traffic, 50% real traffic. Two things will likely happen over time. Google will recognize your site is spammy and will penalize it in some format. Also your users will become unhappy with your site and the ratio of your site's visitors will change to being more spam traffic. Once that happens, I anticipate a fast decline.

I suggest option B as in your best interests for long term benefit of your site.

[EGOL]

I have two concerns....

Are you getting a lot of robot visitors instead of human visitors?  If you are getting lots of robots then those visits will not be valuable to your advertisers and they will eventually stop paying to appear on your site.  The best advertisers are really smart about this.

Are these sports teaser posts accompanied by links to other websites.  If that is happening I would cut them off right away because they are probably making you a linkfarm for spammy websites.

[mcglynn]

Ryan - not half the site's traffic, but half the site's search traffic. And even that is an exaggeration. Webspam search traffic accounts for 28% of overall search traffic.

EGOL - I would say no to the question of robot visitors, because on the instances we checked -- in which spammers used a bit.ly URL for their outbound link -- we were able to measure an astounding 47% clickthrough rate from our site to the spam destination. I would not expect bots to click through.

Also, we use nofollow on all outbound links in user-generated content. I guess that is not a guarantee that we would not be penalized fro hosting a linkfarm, but shouldn't it  be?

If it were up to me, I'd wipe out the webspam entirely. But it's not an easy sell. This content delivers ~750,000 pageviews, ~150k ad views, and probably 100k unique visitors per month, plus the small risk that one day G might penalize us for it. It's not pills, porn, gambling, mortgages, and all the links are nofollowed. The people making this decision don't see a smoking gun.

[RyanKent]

You seem to have a clear understanding of the situation. You are making the conscious choice to continue with your current business practices. It makes sense.

You have a monetary incentive to capture as much traffic as possible due to advertising revenue. As EGOL suggested, I believe the best paying advertisers will recognize your traffic as low quality and either choose not to advertise on your site or pay substantially less then they would for a similar ad on a better site.

You also run the risk of losing many users. Humans don't like spam sites and will leave them for better sites. Additionally Panda changes will surely make it harder for your site to rank on it's legitimate content.

Feel free to disregard this advice. I predict at some point in the not-to-distant future you will lose your advertisers or your traffic. The amount of effort you spend trying to get either back will ensure you never travel down this path again.