Mozilla.org, the non-profit company most famous for the Firefox browser was recently penalized by Google for “user generated spam”. If you do a quick search for ‘site:mozilla.org cheap payday seo’, you’ll find several examples of users abusing the blog comments in the forums and add-ons section. Mozilla was penalized because it allows users to post comments but does nothing to regulate them or clean up the spam.
Google’s John Mueller advised Mozilla to start using spam filters and have someone actively monitoring the comments. For the add-ons section, he suggests allowing users to flag or down vote add-ons so the online community can help with moderation. Also, using rel=nofollow to let search engines know that you don’t endorse the links in those unmoderated comments.
John added that Google tries to go as “granular as possible with our manual actions” which means that only the specific sections and pages were penalized, not the entire site.
By Tony Fong