Like any other search engine, Google also has to work hard to keep its search results completely spam free. The annual webspam report that Google published this week suggests that more than 99% of Google’s search results become spam-free only when the company’s webspam team discovers around 25 billion spammy pages every day, with the help of artificial intelligence!
Now, this is a lot. Google encounters these spam pages daily and filters them out of the its Search results index.
These huge figures show the extent of persistence that these spammers show and the great efforts that Google has to show to keep its search results as much spam-free as possible.
The annual webspam report covers the ways through which the company stayed ahead of these spammers in the year 2019.
Some highlights of this report suggest that the search engine giant has employed some advanced machine learning systems and time-tested manual enforcement capabilities to identify and prevent spammed results to appear in the search index for the users.
With its advanced technologies, Google managed to take action on 82% of the 230,000 reports that it received and processed regarding spam results.
There is a constant threat of Link spam that keeps the search engines on the edges, and Google also goes through the same trouble. But now Google is reportedly getting better at identifying them and taking care of them.
User-generated spam was reduced by 80% in 2018 and did not grow much since 2019. Google also claims that paid links and link exchanges are less effective now, with more than 90% of link spam caught by their systems.
Google has also made some progress in fighting off spammy sites that have auto-generated and sometimes scraped content. These sites not only annoy the users, but they also cause harm to the searchers. Such sites have elements that deceive the users and prompt them to click on fake buttons, or respond to overwhelming as, malware, or suspicious redirects.
This type of spam has been reduced by 60% in 2019 in comparison to 2018.
Google’s Webmaster Outreach also helps a lot in fighting with spammy sites. Whenever Google identifies spam on a site, it sends alerts to the site owner through its Search Console.
These messages and alerts let the site owners know about any spammy problem on their site which may get filtered out and affect their site’s digital appearance in the Google Search results.
Last year only, Google sent more than 90 million messages to site owners for this purpose. Of all these messages, around 4.3 million alerts were related to manual actions which resulted from the site’s violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Apart from this report, Danny Sullivan from Google has written a separate blog post in which he has highlighted this fact that spam is there, and spammers are in constant efforts to infect users’ systems and harm them as much as possible. So, search engines like Google need to keep fighting them off, because otherwise the quality of Search would be greatly affected. It will become very hard for the users to find helpful and relevant information, without getting tricked by phony sites that try to steal personal information or get their systems infected with malware and suspicious content.
So, these are the reasons why the internet behemoth - Google keeps a tight leash on spammers and spammy sites with the help of advanced technologies and complex algorithms.
Photo: Ben Gabbe via Getty Images
Read next: Crowdsourced live data by Google Maps will now help users avoid crowds on public transit
Now, this is a lot. Google encounters these spam pages daily and filters them out of the its Search results index.
These huge figures show the extent of persistence that these spammers show and the great efforts that Google has to show to keep its search results as much spam-free as possible.
The annual webspam report covers the ways through which the company stayed ahead of these spammers in the year 2019.
Some highlights of this report suggest that the search engine giant has employed some advanced machine learning systems and time-tested manual enforcement capabilities to identify and prevent spammed results to appear in the search index for the users.
With its advanced technologies, Google managed to take action on 82% of the 230,000 reports that it received and processed regarding spam results.
There is a constant threat of Link spam that keeps the search engines on the edges, and Google also goes through the same trouble. But now Google is reportedly getting better at identifying them and taking care of them.
User-generated spam was reduced by 80% in 2018 and did not grow much since 2019. Google also claims that paid links and link exchanges are less effective now, with more than 90% of link spam caught by their systems.
- Also read: Google Finally Rolled Out The Featured Snippets To Highlight Search Results On A Web Page
Google has also made some progress in fighting off spammy sites that have auto-generated and sometimes scraped content. These sites not only annoy the users, but they also cause harm to the searchers. Such sites have elements that deceive the users and prompt them to click on fake buttons, or respond to overwhelming as, malware, or suspicious redirects.
This type of spam has been reduced by 60% in 2019 in comparison to 2018.
Google’s Webmaster Outreach also helps a lot in fighting with spammy sites. Whenever Google identifies spam on a site, it sends alerts to the site owner through its Search Console.
These messages and alerts let the site owners know about any spammy problem on their site which may get filtered out and affect their site’s digital appearance in the Google Search results.
Last year only, Google sent more than 90 million messages to site owners for this purpose. Of all these messages, around 4.3 million alerts were related to manual actions which resulted from the site’s violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Apart from this report, Danny Sullivan from Google has written a separate blog post in which he has highlighted this fact that spam is there, and spammers are in constant efforts to infect users’ systems and harm them as much as possible. So, search engines like Google need to keep fighting them off, because otherwise the quality of Search would be greatly affected. It will become very hard for the users to find helpful and relevant information, without getting tricked by phony sites that try to steal personal information or get their systems infected with malware and suspicious content.
So, these are the reasons why the internet behemoth - Google keeps a tight leash on spammers and spammy sites with the help of advanced technologies and complex algorithms.
Photo: Ben Gabbe via Getty Images
Read next: Crowdsourced live data by Google Maps will now help users avoid crowds on public transit
