Search engines are incredibly powerful tools that the majority use every day – helping us find, share and access a wealth of rich content on the web. A report recently published by Google details how the organisation responds to manipulative tactics used to influence rankings.
Through its search quality team, Google works hard to ensure that searchers receive quality results, and not a barrage of deceptive webspam. The company fights spam through an effective combination of algorithms and reviews to ensure that sites don’t rise across its SERPs through manipulative behaviour.
Here are just some of the interesting webspam insights Google gathered last year, including trends, what they’re doing to fight spam and how they’re working to push the landscape even further:
- Google saw a huge number of websites being hacked in 2015 – a 180% increase compared to the previous year.
- Google’s algorithms addressed the vast majority of webspam and search quality improvement for users. One particular update helped to remove the amount of hacked spam in search results.
- The remainder was tackled manually. Google sent over 4.3 million messages to webmasters via Search Console to notify them of manual actions taken on their site and to help them identify any security issues.
- More than 400,000 reports were submitted by webmasters around the world. After prioritising the reports, Google acted on 65% of them, and considered 80% of those acted upon to be spam.
- The company also saw a 33% increase in the number of sites that went through spam clean-up efforts to aid a successful reconsideration process.
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