Google: That Mozilla Penalty Only Impacted One Page Out Of 22 Million

We reported yesterday that Google penalized Mozilla over user generated content. Today, we learn that it was a really, really small penalty that only impacted a single page out of Mozilla’s ~22 million webpages.

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, added more to the Google thread explaining that this manual penalty was applied in a very granular way. In fact, it only impacted a single page on Mozilla’s domain name, blog.mozilla.org/respindola/about.

Matt Cutts wrote:

In this particular case, it was the url http://blog.mozilla.org/respindola/about/ that we took action on, and that was because it was so defaced with spam comments. I checked the URL this morning and it was over 12 megabytes (!) of spam from 21,169 different comments. When a page like that lands in our search results, it’s the sort of thing that users complain to us about, so we are willing to take action.

Besides that being an incredible number of spammy comments on a single page, it is upsetting to see how confused Mozilla’s webmaster was over Google’s penalty notification. Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of Google getting more detailed in their Webmaster Tools penalty notifications. But as you can see from our coverage of the penalty and Mozilla’s questions about the penalty, it appeared that this was a little larger than just impacting a single page on this massive site.

This is a similar situation as when the BBC was penalized, and it turned out to be a penalty on one page.

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About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.