We’ve known for some time now that Google sometimes selects to ignore spam and sometimes selects to penalize the spam (i.e. devalues vs demotes). The topic came up again when we covered how Gary from Google talked about how they ignore Forbe’s link spam.

John Mueller in yesterday’s Google hangout at the 46:32 mark into the video where one webmaster discusses how this Forbes spam happens. He explains:

John responds explaining that they recently issued a warning about this and it has been an issue for a long time that the search quality team is aware of. He said Google takes a “two-pronged approach” with this type of spam. Specifically “on the one hand manually we try to take action where we think it’s necessary on the other hand algorithmically we try to ignore things that we can kind of isolate,” he said.

Here is the video embed at the start time:

Here is the answer transcript:

Forum discussion at YouTube.