Super Google fights webspam

2 Minutes
Sara Armitage

We may not think about it much but working hard behind the scenes to combat webspam, is the good guy Google. We all carry out searches, often dozens of times a day and expect to receive accurate, relevant results.

Google’s latest report on webspam, issued this month, looks at trends for 2015 and reveals that they encountered a 180% increase in websites being hacked compared to 2014. Not something to be complacent about.

The report looks at the efforts made by Google to clean up search results using various techniques. Thus helping to improve search quality and reduce spam. It also underlines the importance of verifying your website in the Google Search Console so that you can be alerted of any issues found on your site.

The results also flagged up an “increase in the number of sites with thin or low quality content.” These are pages that don’t offer users any valuable content.

Google uses algorithms (self-contained step by step set of operations) to combat spam plus manual actions.  They sent out over 4.3 million messages, manual actions, to webmasters to let them know of work done on their site to help identify issues. An increase of 33% followed up on these messages, cleaning up their sites towards a successful reconsideration.

Google also reported that users submitted over 400,000 spam reports and of these, Google acted on 65% of them. 80% of those acted on were considered to be spam.

At Wish Digital, we have found spam to be a growing problem within the analytics reports for our client websites. Our blog post from July 2015 talked about this very problem and how users can filter out as much spam web traffic as possible. So it’s great news to know that Google continue to battle with the spammers, they have our support and we’ll continue to filter out and protect our clients from web spam as much as possible.

View