Does UGC SPAM Help or Hurt Your SEO? Sometimes Both.

All sorts of websites allow users to add content. Perhaps the most common are review sites like Yelp or Trip Advisor and blogs that allow comments. A lot of the biggest sites in the world are so big precisely because they allow users to create most, if not all, of the content (think Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, Quora, etc.). Although SEO is not their only marketing channel, these sites often rely on structuring the UGC to make it easier for search engines to digest and rank them.

A combination of a ton of UGC, backlinks, and brand searches often makes for a fast-growing SEO program.

But if you don’t have a good way to fight SPAM, you may find your SEO program cranking way up, then, just as quickly cranking way down.

Case in point: We work with a large UGC site. This past April, we noticed their Google traffic spiking upwards by ~50%. Awesome! We chalked it up to a lucky algo update and kind of forgot about it until a few weeks later, we noticed their Google traffic tanking by ~50%. Not fun.

We quickly realized the spike was going to pages that were created by UGC spammers designed to rank for high traffic porn and gambling queries in various countries. So the traffic was worthless, and it cost the client some $ in bandwidth costs. So they were glad it was declining, as there organic inbound business had not declined much over that time.

I was curious to see what their Google traffic looked like if I removed the SPAM clicks. I created a huge regex statement (e.g. “spam-term-1|spam-term-2|spam-term-3”, etc.) and filtered Google Search Console’s Search Results report to show only pages with the SPAM URLs. This is what it looked like:

I then reversed the regex to remove the SPAM URLs. This is what it looked like:

I then overlaid one over the other and this is what it looked like:

If you have ever received a “manual action” warning in Google Search Console about UGC SPAM on your site, you know it’s probably not good to let it run wild on your site. But this data gives pretty clear indication that UGC SPAM, or any SPAM for that matter, can be seriously detrimental to your SEO performance.