Google has penalized Mozilla.org, the site of the not-for-profit organization that provides Firefox browser. This doesn't seem to be an accident as happened recently with Digg. Indeed, this is a real problem of spam that met with the Foundation.
Christopher More, Product Manager at Mozilla Web has posted on this topic on the Google Webmaster Help forum, where he shared the message he received from Google:
"Google has detected user-generated spam on your site. Typically, this kind of spam is found on forum pages, guestbook pages, or in user profiles. As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to your site."
« I am unable to find a spam on http://www.mozilla.org," said More. "I tried website: www.mozilla.org [spam terms] and nothing was back on the field. I found a page of spam on an older version of the site, but it is a 301 redirected to an archived site».
The Google Webmaster Trends, John Mueller analyst, responded:
To some extent, we will manually remove any particularly egregious spam from our search results that we find, so some of those pages may not be directly visible in Google’s web-search anymore. Looking at the whole domain, I see some pages similar to those that Pelagic (thanks!) mentioned: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:mozilla.org+cheap+payday+seo (you’ll usually also find them with pharmaceutical brand-names among other terms).
In addition to the add-ons, there are a few blogs hosted on mozilla.org that appear to have little or no moderation on the comments, for example http://blog.mozilla.org/respindola/about/ looks particularly bad. For these kinds of sites, it may make sense to allow the community to help with comment moderation (eg. allow them to flag or vote-down spam), and to use the rel=nofollow link microformat to let search engines know that you don’t endorse the links in those unmoderated comments.
For more tips on handling UGC (and I realize you all probably have a lot of experience in this already) are at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81749
Also keep in mind that we work to be as granular as possible with our manual actions. Personally, I think it’s good to react to a message like that by looking into ways of catching and resolving the cases that get through your existing UGC infrastructure, but in this particular case, this message does not mean that your site on a whole is critically negatively affected in our search results.
According to the response, it seems that in addition to add-ons, there are some blogs hosted on mozilla.org that seem to have little or no moderation in the comments, for example http://blog.mozilla.org/respindola/about/ which the quality of the comments seem particularly bad. According to Mueller, "for these types of sites, it may be appropriate to enable the community to help the comment moderation, and to use the rel = nofollow attribute in order to let the search engines know that you do not appreciate links in not moderate comments.
That it be a lesson for all webmasters and all bloggers. Remember to clean your comments! Indeed it seems to me that it's also recently happened to Korben.
Mozilla always seems to appear in the search results key as "mozilla" and "web browser". This is not as bad when Google had to penalize its own Chrome browser for paid links...
