Live blogging: Matt Cutts on “web spam,” or gaming your Google search ranking

Our live blogging continues with, “What Google Knows About Spam,” from the Web 2.0 Expo.

Spammers have been gaming Google search results for ever. They will take misspelled words and put all of the variations of something popular, like “tax deferred,” so they can climb higher in search rankings. Matt Cutts of Google spends a lot of his time dealing with this.

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One of the ways that Google deals with this is build “reputation or trust” into its system. It tries to frustrate spammers by costing them time. One way to get higher in Google News rankings is by having a lot of people link to your particular web post or site, he said.

There are plenty of white hat “search engine optimization” companies out there who can give you good tips on how to climb higher legitimately. Spammers, however, try to embed hidden words in a web page so that it will get a lot of traffic, erroneously, from search engines that are seeking those words.

“Google knows that spam will get more malicious and more dangerous in the years ahead,” he said, noting yesterday that one attack through spam affected 500,000 pages on the web.

“Try to get trust, get reputation into your system,” he said. “You’ll save yourself a ton of grief. Make spammers spend extra time and effort if they’re going to spam you.”

You can register your site at google.com/webmasters/ and Google will alert you to hacks on your site that spammers can attack.

“Spam is avoidable and if you take action on these items, then you don’t have to worry about spam breaking your heart,” he said.