Google yesterday published a post on how they fought spam on the webmaster blog. Google mentioned, we fight spam through a combination of algorithms and manual reviews to ensure that sites don’t rise in search results through deceptive or manipulative behavior, especially because those sites could harm or mislead users.
Some important web spam insights Google gathered in 2015:
- Huge no. of websites being hacked. 180% increase compared to the previous year.
- Increase in the no. of websites having thin or low quality content.
Actions taken by Google:
- One of the algorithmic updates helped to remove the amount of hacked spam in search results.
- Google sent more than 4.3 million messages to webmasters to notify them of manual actions they took on their site and to help them identify the issues.
- There was a 33% increase in the number of sites that went through spam clean-up efforts towards a successful reconsideration process.
- Users submitted more than 4,00,000 spam reports to Google. Google acted on 65% of them, and considered 80% of those acted upon to be spam.
- Google conducted more than 200 online office hours and live events around the world in 17 languages.
- Webmasters had tens of thousands of questions answered, including over 35,000 by users designated as Webmaster Top Contributors. webmaster help forum continued to be an excellent source of webmaster support.
- Google believes, fighting web spam is one of the many ways they can maintain search quality at Google and Google thanked all those who submitted reports and contributed towards a cleaner web ecosystem!
