Google's Matt Cutts answered a user question about how the company handles spam complaints in the most recent video upload to the Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel. More specifically, the question was:

Is there a minimum number of spam complaints about a domain and/or SERP before Google reviews the complaint? Presumably you get thousands of spam complaints daily, are these sorted into any order to be reviewed? The most popular first?

Cutts says Google does order complaints, and that typically, they try to think about what the impact is on the user. So if they get a spam complaint on a site that a lot of users are going to see, it will get more attention from Google than a spam complaint on a site that almost never gets seen.

"We do look at a ton of spam complaints," says Cutts. "We do take action on a ton of spam complaints."

Google takes spam reports into account for future versions of its algorithms. Cutts says they look at these to determine how they should tackle certain things.

Whenever Google's looking at spam complaints they're trying to take manual action on, Cutts says they think about how they can best use their resources, and one of the ways to do that is to look at the complaints about the sites that would most affect users. "That's one of the ways we look at spam complaints," he says.