Each year, Google publishes a report that details the results of the company’s fight against spam pages.
The report reflecting its 2019 efforts was published last Tuesday, June 9. As part of the report, Google explains that more than 99% of searches performed within the search engine are spam-free and the company makes every effort to stay ahead of spammers.
In the report, Google highlighted the lengths a spammer is willing to go to have a page published online and appearing in the search results.
Just how many pages of spam were found in 2019?
According to Google’s report, it’s webspam team uncovered 25 billion pages of spam on a daily basis, which are filtered out of the search results index.
Furthermore, the report highlighted that the company received around 230,000 reports of spam content within search results during the course of 2019, and it was able to act on 82% of the reports it processed. Google attributes this to the way it has improved its machine learning systems and their capabilities to fight spam, which it has said was a top priority for the year.
A victory for Google
As a result of its efforts to fight against spam and keep it at bay, Google said that spam was reduced by up to 80% in 2018 and it managed to maintain this level in 2019, with spam not growing during these 12 months.
Link spam continues to be a popular form of spam, but Google has explained that it is now getting better at detecting it. It also confirmed that link exchanges and paid links are becoming even less effective, with over 90% of link spam being caught by Google’s systems.
Google is also progressing in its battle with spam sites featuring automatically generated and scraped content. These particular sites tend to annoy searchers and feature elements such as fake buttons, dubious redirects, malware and ad overload. This was reduced by over 60% in 2019, in comparison with 2018.
As part of the fight against spam, Google reaches out to webmasters through its Search Console. Last year, it sent more than 90 million messages and notifications to website owners to let them know of any problems and issues that may affect the appearance of their site in the search results. Of these messages, 4.3 million were in relation to manual actions as a result of guideline violations.
Google has stressed the importance of keeping spam away from search results. Without spam, it is easier for users to find useful information and resources they can trust within the top results without being tricked, hacked or stolen from.
To keep your site filled with up-to-date, relevant and quality content, speak to the team at Engage Web.
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