This year in Search Spam – Webspam report 2018

Thursday, March 21, 2019

Google aims to provide the highest quality results for any search. As part of this, we take
action to prevent what we call “webspam” from degrading the search experience, content and
behaviors that violate our
webmaster guidelines. Our
efforts help ensure that well under 1 percent of results visited by users are for spammy pages.
Here’s more about how we fought webspam in 2018.

Google webspam trends and how we fought webspam in 2018

Of the types of spam we fought in 2018, three continue to stand out:

Spam on hacked websites:
We reported in 2017
that we had seen a substantial reduction of spam from hacked websites in search results. This
trend continued in 2018, with faster discovery of hacked web pages before they affect search
results or put someone in harm’s way. While we reduced how spam on hacked sites affects search,
hacked websites remain a major security problem affecting the safety of the web. Even though we
can’t prevent a website hack from happening, we’re committed to helping webmasters whose
websites have been compromised by offering resources to
help them recover from a hacked website.

User-generated spam:
A particular type of spam known as User-generated spam has been a continued focus for us.
User-generated spam includes spammy posts on forums, as well as spammy accounts on blogs
and platforms, none of which are meant to be consumed by human beings, and all of which disrupt
conversations while adding no value to users. In 2018, we were able to reduce the impact on
search users from this type of spam by more than 80%. While we can’t prevent websites from
being exploited, we do want to make it easier for website owners to learn how to protect
themselves, which is why we provide resources on
how to prevent abuse of your site’s public areas.

Link spam:
We continued to protect the value of authoritative and relevant links as an important ranking
ignal for Search. We continued to deal swiftly with egregious link spam, and made a number of
bad linking practices less effective for manipulating ranking. Above all, we continued to
engage with webmasters and SEOs to chip away at the many myths that have emerged over the years
relating to linking practices. We continued to remind website owners that if you simply stay away
from building links
mainly as an attempt to rank better and focus on creating great content, you should not have to
worry about any of the myths or realities. We think that one of the best ways of fighting spam
of all types is by encouraging website owners to just create great quality content. Resources such
as the SEO starter-guide
highlight best practices and bust some common myths and misconceptions related to what it takes
to appear well in Google Search results.
Reporting link spam is also a great way
to assist us in fighting against this type of abuse and to help preserve fairness in Search
ranking.

Working with users, webmasters and developers for a better web

Everyday users continue to help us find spam, malware and other issues in Search that escape
our filters and processes by
reporting spam on search,
reporting phishing
o
reporting malware.
We received over 180,000 search spam user reports and we were able to take action on 64% of the
reports we processed. These reports truly make a difference and we’d like to thank all of you
who submitted them.

We think it’s important to let website owners known when we detect something wrong with
their website. In 2018, we generated over 186 million messages to website owners calling out
potential improvements, issues and problems that could affect their site’s appearance on Search
results. We can only deliver these notifications to site owners that verified their sites in
Search Console,
and we successfully delivered 96 million of those messages. The rest of the messages will be kept
linked with the website for as long as they are relevant, so they can be seen when a webmaster
successfully registers their site in Search Console. The majority of these messages were
welcoming new users to Search Console, and the second largest group was informing registered
Search Console users when Mobile-First Indexing became available. Of all messages, slightly
over 2%—about 4 million—were related to
manual actions
resulting from violations of our Webmaster Guidelines.

High quality content keeps spam off of search results, and we continued to improve the tools
and reports we offer for webmasters that create that content. The
Google Search Console
was completely rebuilt from the ground up to provide both new and improved reports (
Rendimiento,
Index Coverage,
Links,
Mobile Usability report), as well as brand new features (
URL Inspection Tool
and
Site and User management).
This improved Search Console graduated out of beta in 2018 and is now available generally to
all registered website owners.

We didn’t forget the front-end developers who make the modern web work, and focused on
helping them make their sites great for users and also search-friendly regardless of whether
they are on a CMS, roll their own CSS and JS, or build on top of a web framework. With the new
SEO audit capability in
Lighthouse, the open-source and automated
auditing tool for improving the quality of web pages, developers and webmasters can now run
actionable
SEO health-checks
on their pages and quickly identify areas for improvement.

We also engage directly with website owners to provide help with thorny issues. Our
dedicated team members meet with webmasters around the world regularly, both online and
in-person. We delivered more than 190
online office hours, online events and offline events in more than 76
cities, to audiences totaling over 170,000 including SEOs, developers and online marketers. We
hosted four search events in Tokyo, Singapore, Zurich and Osaka as well as an 11-city Search
Conference in India. In 2018, we started live office hours in Spanish on top of English, French,
German, Hindi and Japanese, where Webmasters can find help, tips and useful discussion on our
Google Webmaster YouTube channel.
Product experts continued to help webmasters find solutions through our
official support forums
in over a dozen languages.

We look forward to continuing our work to deliver a Search experience without spam to all in 2019!

Posted by Juan Felipe Rincón, Webmaster Outreach, Dublin