User-generated spam is spammy content that users add to a website through a channel meant for user content, such as comments, forum threads, profiles, or file uploads. Google recommends that site owners limit and remove it.
What does Google say?
Google’s spam policies list spammy accounts on free hosting services, spammy posts on forum threads, comment spam on blogs, and spammy files on upload platforms as examples. For protection, Google points to a guide on preventing abuse of public areas.
Which protections does Google recommend?
- manual approval or moderation of certain user interactions
noindexfor posts from new users until they gain reputationrel="ugc"orrel="nofollow"on links in untrusted content- reCAPTCHA or similar checks at sign-up
- monitoring patterns such as request frequency and banning repeat offenders by IP address
- a published abuse policy and a way for trusted users to report spam
Example
A link in a blog comment:
HTML
<a href="https://example.com/" rel="ugc">My site</a>
The attribute marks the link as user-generated content. Google says links marked this way will generally not be followed.
Sources
- Spam policies: user-generated spam – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Prevent abuse of your site's public areas – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Qualify your outbound links to Google – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
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