Google’s efforts to fight spam out of its search results are evident, and one indication is its webspam report published. According to this report, at least 99% of Google’s search results are spam free, and the search engine has gone to great lengths to keep it like that.
For example, its webspam team discovers more than 25 billion spammy pages daily, which are filtered out of the search results index.
As Google puts it, that’s a lot of spam, showing the scale and persistence spammers have. The search engine received almost 230,000 reports of spam in the search results and took action on at least 82% of the reports.
Google plans to improve its machine learning system capabilities in fighting spam, which was among the top priorities last year. The machine learning solutions and their time-tested manual capabilities were instrumental in identifying and preventing spammy pages from being served to Google users.
Google’s victories in spam fighting
- User-generated spam results were reduced by 80% from 2018.
- Google’s systems caught over 90% of link spam.
Google noted the progress it has made to fight spammy pages with scraped content. The sites scrapped generally engage in practices that harm or annoy searchers. Examples include sites that have elements such as overwhelming ads, fake buttons, malware, and suspicious redirects.
The search engine reduced the impact on search users from these spams by over 60% last year compared to 2018.
Webmaster outreach efforts
Google also acknowledges the webmaster outreach efforts in this fight against spammy sites and links. Once Google detects spam, it alerts the owner of the site via the Search Console.
Last year, Google sent more than 90 million messages to site owners. The messages were sent to owners alerting them of issues that affect their sites’ appearance in search results. Over 4.3 million messages of the 90 million were related to manual actions coming from violation of the Webmaster Guidelines.
What’s the essence of spam-fighting?
Without spam-fighting, the quality of search results would be reduced drastically, making it very hard for users to find relevant information. If spammy results appear on the first pages, the likelihood of users being tricked by phony sites and getting their information stolen increases. So, the lesser the spammy results, the higher the quality of search results.
