Their are billions of pages on the internet at present and one of the most frustrating things about search and search engines is the amount of spam, irrelevant, blank, or cash grabbing pages that appear in search results. It is frustrating for searchers, it is frustrating for honest sites who see these pages appear above them in the search results, and it is frustrating for the search engines themselves; they want to provide quality results.

Google has always had a policy and a procedure for reporting sites that fit into several categories. Spam, paid links and blank pages are just three categories that can be reported. By reporting these sites you may be helping your own sites in the long term.

The temptation of course is to only report those sites that are appearing above you in the SERPs. The reality is that you will probably see more of those sites since that is the genre you are looking in. However, I suggest you report any site you come across if it breaches any of Googles terms. If we all took that attitude then a lot of the rubbish that is on the net at present may at least be removed from the search engine indexes – at least Googles in this case.

Matt Cutts has recently published a post on his site talking about empty review pages. If you ever do a search for product reviews you will know what I am talking about. Sites appear in the search results yet they have no content related to the search. These pages need removing from the search engine index so they do not appear in the search results. I won’t repeat Matt’s post here, take a read and follow his suggestions on what and how to report these pages.

If we can remove the pages that are frustrating everyone, it may just make our lives a little easier. Why spend days with SEO programs trying to outrank a garbage site when it can be reported and removed from the equation. As a search engine, Google wants happy users – so do we – don’t we?