How we fought webspam in 2015

Monday, May 02, 2016

Search is a powerful tool. It helps people to find, share, and access an amazing wealth of content
regardless of how they connect or where they are located. As part of Google’s search quality team,
we work hard to ensure that searchers see high quality search results—and not webspam. We fight
spam through a combination of algorithms and manual reviews to ensure that sites don’t rise in
search results through
deceptive or manipulative behavior,
especially because those sites could harm or mislead users.

Below are some of the webspam insights we gathered in 2015, including trends we’ve seen, what
we’re doing to fight spam and protect against those trends, and how we’re working with you to make
the web better.

2015 webspam trends

• We saw a huge number of websites being hacked—a 180% increase compared to the previous
  year. Stay safe on the web and
  take preventative measures
  to protect your content on the web.
• We saw an increase in the number of sites with
  thin, low quality content.
  Such content contains little or no added value and is often scraped from other sites.

2015 spam-fighting efforts

• As always, our algorithms addressed the vast majority of webspam and search quality improvement
  for users. One of our algorithmic updates helped to
  remove the amount of hacked spam
  in search results.
• The rest of spam was tackled manually. We sent more than 4.3 million messages to webmasters to
  notify them of
  manual actions
  we took on their site and to help them identify the issues.
• We saw a 33% increase in the number of sites that went through spam clean-up efforts towards a successful
  reconsideration process.

Working with users and webmasters for a better web

• More than 400,000 spam reports were
  submitted by users around the world. After prioritizing the reports, we acted on 65% of them,
  and considered 80% of those acted upon to be spam. Thanks to all who submitted reports and
  contributed towards a cleaner web ecosystem!
• We conducted more than 200 online office hours and live events
  around the world in 17 languages. These are great opportunities for us to help webmasters with
  their sites and for them to share helpful feedback with us as well.
• The
  webmaster help forum
  continued to be an excellent source of webmaster support. Webmasters had tens of thousands of
  questions answered, including over 35,000 by users designated as Webmaster Top Contributors.
  Also, 56 Webmaster Top Contributors joined us at our
  Top Contributor Summit to
  discuss how to provide users and webmasters with better support and tools. We’re grateful for
  our awesome Top Contributors and their tremendous contributions!

We’re continuously improving our spam-fighting technology and working closely with webmasters and
users to foster and support a high-quality web ecosystem. (In fact, fighting webspam is one of the
many ways we
maintain search quality at Google.)
Thanks for helping to keep spammers away so users can continue accessing great content in Google
Search.

Posted by Kiyotaka Tanaka and Mary Chen, User Education and Search Outreach