Anyone who uses the Internet has probably been a victim of spam. According to Matt Cutts, engineer and head of Google's Web spam team, Google sees more spam than most companies ever would.

Cutts has been working to overcome the spam nuisance for eight years. At the Web 2.0 Expo 2008 in San Francisco, he offered some tips about countering the spam problem for Web sites during his speech titled "What Google Knows about Spam".

He spoke about how it is possible to make life a little more difficult for spammers so they can concentrate on someone else. Cutts' recommendations include using captcha systems to make sure real people and not bots are commenting on your site. However, captcha systems may not be as secure -- as Websense security researcher Sumeet Prasad points out in his blog post: spammers have managed to get past captcha systems with creating automated bots that not only sign-up and create Blogger accounts but also use these accounts for advertising their products and services. Cutts also recommends that users reconfigure software settings after installation, i.e. employ systems that rank people by trust and reputation. Cutts says SEO (search engine optimization) is not spam and that Google does not hate SEO. Lastly, he recommends registering a Web site at Google's Webmaster Central site to help find bogus SOE tricks others may use on your site; for instance, keywords written in white text on white background.

Interestingly, just before his speech, Cutts wrote in his blog that he was struggling with what exactly to say: on the one hand, Google knows a lot about spam, on the other, they don't want to disclose anything that might benefit spammers. Makes one wonder; perhaps there are more effective ways to counter spam!