Google Confirm Universal Shutdown Policy On Spam Hosts

Further incentive, should it be needed, for users to keep a close eye on the quality of their web hosting service came this week with the highly unorthodox but seemingly valid confirmation from Google that they can, and will, take action to shut out all of the sites hosted on a particular server if they feel the host to be a provider of an abnormal amount of spam-related content.

The rumour has existed for a while now although Google has been reluctant to make it public; it has happened before and has been discussed in the industry but website owners are not told it routinely.  Even now, the Google blogs themselves appear to be silent on the subject, in terms of official blog posts.

However, Kaspar Szymanski, a Search Quality Strategist at Google (basically someone who spends his entire day refining, testing, and policing their black box algorithm) responded to a comment on the Polish Google Webmaster help pages from a webmaster complaining that his site was not ranking highly.

Kaspar posted a reply in Polish on the site, and tweeted: “If freehosts appear 2b massively spammed #Google reserves the right 2take action on the entire site” In other words, if free or cheap hosting services prove to be the source of a high level of spam-related content, then Google will take unilateral action against all their hosted sites; regardless of whether there are high-quality sites in the mix.

So a word to the wise; make sure your hosting service has some quality control measures in there, or you risk being swept away through no fault of your own.