Aleksandra
The increasing number of deceptive websites and users who try to manipulate the SERPs have been interfering with Google’s attempt to always provide the most relevant and highest-quality results.
Nevertheless, Google has been continuously putting a huge effort towards ceasing this abusive trend. For many years, less than 1% of the search results were spammy. In 2017, however, this number was reduced by half.
Let’s see that in numbers!
Google’s Annual Webspam Report: Main Takeaways
- Almost 90,000 users reported search spam last year.
- More than 80% of hacked websites were detected and removed from search results.
- Google used Search Console to send 45 million messages to website owners to inform them about known issues with their websites.
- Over 6 million of these messages were in relation to manual actions.
Now, let’s see the main webspam trends in 2017, as per Google’s annual report.
#1 Hacking Websites
The number of hacked websites with the intention to spread malware or viruses, or spam the search rankings, stood as a serious threat to users during the past year.
Hackers inserted harmful code or malware, erased content, and even recorded keystrokes to steal personally identifiable information from users.
This was a popular trend over the years, but Google has managed to reduce the hacked sites by 80% during 2017.
Hacking affects website owners, too. In an attempt to protect the webmasters and help them enhance the security of their website, Google has created a hands-on resource which provides everything needed to securely code a website or a web app.
Google also enhanced the help resources to assist website owners in recovering faster from a hacked website.
#2 Spammers
Spammers used some of the most popular CMS’s to manipulate with user-generated content and post spam content in comments or forums. Google worked closely with CMS’s such as Joomla and WordPress to fight them.
#3 Manipulation of Links
Links are a fundamental ranking signal which made them a subject of manipulations – a webspam trend that was still present in 2017. Google put in a lot of effort and finally managed to significantly reduce the number of unnatural links via manual actions and updated algorithms. The result is – spam links reduced by half.
How Google Fights Webspam: Keypoints
- The beta version of the Search Console was released to help webmasters optimize their websites easily.
- Google implemented Safe Browsing protections in an attempt to protect more users from web-based threats.
- Google introduced a wide variety of channels to engage with webmasters directly and provide valuable tips and insights, including support forums, blog and guides now available in 19 languages.
- Google conducted over 250 hours in meetups around the world, reaching more than 220,000 webmasters.
These improvements are a massive step towards completely abuse-free UX. Cody Kwok, Google’s Principal Engineer, emphasizes that they will continue implementing improvements in order to reach this goal.
