Spam scores are values from zero to one where zero indicates that the listing is legitimate and one indicates that the listing is fraudulent. Whenever a spam will be detected, a first threshold spam score would be applied on the business. When the spam score is greater than a first threshold, the listing will get identified as fraudulent and chances are that it might get removed from or not included in the group of searchable business listings. When the spam score is greater than a second threshold that is less than the first threshold, the listing may be demoted to such extent that it won’t get displayed in response to a search as frequently or as highly rated as listings having spam scores that are less than the second threshold. Constant inclusions under spam scores rated as 1 might render the business as fraudulent and the listing may be flagged for inspection. If the spam score is less than the first and second thresholds, the corresponding listing is identified as legitimate and included in the group of searchable listings.
This move guarantees that webmasters, black hat seo’s and webmasters would be discouraged to reverse engineer the algorithmic changes which Google does from time to time. It will be no surprise if we see such type of spam score for every website along with the local listing score.
Spammers should remain beware because even a small move to manipulate Google algorithm can put any business in trouble.
Recommended Reading:
Reverse Engineering Circumvention of Spam Detection Algorithms
Google Patent Attacks Reverse Engineering of Local Search Listings
Also See:
Ranking Documents is Set to Penalize Spammers
New Google Patent to Identify Spam in Information Collected From a Source
Domain authority and Google results
How does Google applies Semantic Search
Emanuel Update
Google Sandbox effect
Google Penguin update
Knowledge Graph
How Google Uses Contextual Search Terms
Taxonomic Classification to Find Real Context of Words
Google Tag Manager
Multi Channel Funnel in Google Analytics
Regular Expressions on Google Analytics
Search Queries in Webmasters Tools
