Google warns over social media spam

Webmasters and web developers should beware of social profile spam on Google search, quality engineer Jason Morrison said.

In the Google webmaster blog entry published late last week, Morrison warned of the perils of allowing too much social profile spam to permeate one’s site.

“You probably don’t want your visitors’ first impression of your site to include inappropriate images or bogus business offers,” Morrison said.

“You definitely don’t want your users hounded by fake invites to the point where they stop visiting altogether. If your site becomes filled with spammy content and links to bad parts of the web, search engines may lose trust in your otherwise fine site.”

Morrison gave a few suggestions about how websites can fortify their sites against such spam by means of security features like CAPTCHAs, blacklisting repetitive spam, being weary of cross-site scripting and more.