Google: No, We Don’t Use Akismet To Catch Link Spam

There’s speculation going around that Google is using data from the comment spam filter Akismet to penalize web sites. Those rumors are untrue, Google says.

“We don’t use Akismet to flag spam,” a Google spokesperson told us, after talking with Google’s spam team.

One oddity in the speculation was this:

She stated that Google had left a client of hers the dreaded unnatural linking notice in GWT, with example urls of pages it found unnatural links on. This part is nothing new really, but until now we had no idea how Google was deciding this…

Google’s warning notices, such as those that have increased recently, don’t list actual URLs. We’ve reconfirmed this with Google. Instead, they’re a general message like this:

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines….

So it’s unclear how this person received a warning from Google about particular URLs, much less URLs that were never published on the web because they were trapped within a spam filter.

Postscript By Danny Sullivan: The story above was updated to clarify that to our knowledge, Google doesn’t report specific URLs within its unnatural linking notices messages, which as explained makes the speculation even more speculative. But if anyone wants to pass along the actual warning received with those URLs, we’re happy to take another look.

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