We learned earlier this year that Google prioritizes spam reports from users with a clean spam history, something that Gary Illyes confirmed again in Big Digital Adelaide. But it also left some details for users who file false spam reports.
The specific question was about people who have a Ton of fake spam reports about every little thing that's wrong with a site, regardless of whether it was a real spam problem or not.
“We are more confident in some reports,” Illyes said. “If someone files a ton of false reports, we'll start by ignoring them. We have a lot of experience with this, we know that companies will report to each other because they can. It is an open form and anyone can use it.”
He also added that Google has policies to deal with these types of situations. “We develop policies on how to deal with these types of cases.”
Illyes did not want to go into further detail about these policies. He said that if they were too transparent with such policies, some could use that information to abuse spam reporting.
He also said that they are able to identify and recognize when 40 spam reports are coming in from the same user or IP address.
This also explains why some spam reports are not attended to, as they are not actually true. In fact, Google has said that the 20% of spam reports are not spam at all, and I suspect that many of those are just people who filed spam reports from competitors, even if they can't see the spam themselves, they hope that the manual actions team will notice something so they can resolve it.
So in summary, you don't need to worry about the presence of a competitor repeatedly filing spam reports, Google can recognize this.
That said, if you spam enough for a manual action, it probably won't stop at a manual action…. They probably won't stop you from filing a spam report about a competitor.