At SMX West yesterday, Juan Felipe Rincon, Webmaster Outreach at Google talked about manual actions taken on websites for a variety of reasons, covering everything from spam to hacked sites with content placed without the webmaster’s permission.  But he did have some interesting new stats to share.

Every month, Google receives 35,000 spam reports.  These are reports filed by searchers (both SEOs and regular searchers) when they see a spammy site in the search results.

Google takes action on 65% of those 35,000 per month.  Of those, 80% of those reported are considered to be spam.  The remaining 20% weren’t spam.

While Google didn’t reveal the number of spam fighters they have who deal with the manual penalties, there must be a significant number in order to process this number on a monthly basis.