A few weeks ago, Google's Matt Cutts sent the SEO world into an uproar with his latest announcement.
"Spam is something delivered to me that's completely irrelevant of my needs. I consider something to be spam when I glance at it and realize that it doesn't pertain to me or what I'm looking for. For example, if I have put myself out there that I'm interested in booking a vacation, I would expect to receive offers about deals relevant to my search or requests. I do not, however, expect to receive offers about diet or sex pills, YouTube videos, princes of Nigeria requesting a western union money transfer, etc." - Email Marketing
"Overload with non-contextual and/or heavily biased information, either with intent or without; related to marketing definition of 'noise'. In service management terms it would be information that is delivered, which has low utility or warranty for the individual user/customer." - Guestdesk Customer Support
"To me, spam can be a lot of different scenarios.1.) Anything, either via email, instant message, or a social media network that is unsolicited. This I think would be considered the traditional view.2.) Sites that you can tell the content is just SEO fluff content that's jammed with keywords.3.) Emails/messages from places where I've signed up for, but they end up annoying me by sending 3+ emails a day, For example, signing up for a restaurant to get a coupon, and later you find out you get 3-4 emails from them a day talking about nothing of interest.4.) Sites (especially file downloading sites) that have "disguised" download buttons. Ones where you find, say an old printer driver that you need, and you go to download it and there are ads everywhere plus multiple download style buttons that aren't actually the real link, just redirects you to other places." - Designer
"After personally ruining and fixing dozens of systems and fixing hundreds more for other people, I'm at a point today where I feel totally comfortable recognizing spam, scams, and bad overall bad information online. I believe the ability to recognize those things do not depend on a set of skills that you can learn but rather another sense that you have to develop with time and experience. I have a system that's been online for over 2 years without an antivirus and is completely bug free whereas I know people who have an antivirus, malware protection, adware protection, spam filters, and do everything I recommend them to do and still manage to "catch" everything thrown their way.Recognizing spam specifically is equivalent to recognizing a fake Rolex being sold to you in Chinatown. Your only weapon there is getting over the excitement of buying a real Rolex for $50 and looking at the offer objectively, same with spam." - Programmer
"I think spam falls under the old pornography description from the Supreme Court case years ago - "I don't know to define it, but I know it when I see it". I think even the owl.ly toolbar is a form of spam. Any kind of obtrusive or "in the way of what I want to do" kind of advertising, to where functionality for a user is inhibited qualifies for me more than keyword overloading (though, like we talked about, that's also annoying)." - Designer
"I never like sites that are returned in the search on the top pages that are just a page of links to other sites. I immediately leave those sites. I almost find the paid ads on the top and left (I use Yahoo) as a SPAM type of ad as well because I know those are paid and may or may not be what I am looking for. I see them as being the overbearing used car salesman of search results." - Customer Service
"Any type of unsolicited or useless content on the web." - SEO Specialist
