On Friday, at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Matt Cutts, Google engineer, head of Google's Web spam team, kept a very informative speech ("What Google Knows About Spam") on spam and ways to go around it. Keyword spam, widely covered by the session, represents the use of words, oftenly having to connection what so ever with the actual content of the website, in order to "trick" search engines to direct traffic towards them. Once users arrive on the page, they are most likely to be hit with commercial ads and even viruses.

Matt Cutts gave those managing websites of their own or of others’ a few advices that should come in handy in the fight against the ever-present spam. Users should employ captcha systems in order to tell whether or not actual people (and not bots) are posting comments on their websites (it is quite easy, as a simple math question is used – what is 2+2? for instance – or the funny KittenAuth, which makes visitors identify photos of kittens). Furthermore, users should reconfigure software settings immediatly after installation and start using systems which rank according to trust and reputation.

As it was made clear on Friday, Google currently has a perfectly good grasp on spam and the information it made available will probably be of use to people everywhere. The battle between spammers and spam control offices such as Mr. Cutts’ is most likely to keep going and going, as the two are evolving at the same time and in the same direction. For now though, Matt Cutts says: "Spam is avoidable and if you take action on these items, then you don’t have to worry about spam breaking your heart."