Thursday, June 28, 2018
We always want to make sure that when you use Google Search to find information, you get the
highest quality results. But, we are aware of many bad actors who are trying to manipulate
search ranking and profit from it, which is at odds with our core mission: to organize the
world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Over the years, we’ve
devoted a huge effort toward combating abuse and spam on Search. Here’s a look at how we
fought abuse in 2017.
We call these various types of abuse that violate the
webmaster guidelines “spam.”
Our evaluation indicated that for many years, less than 1 percent of search results users visited
are spammy. In the last couple of years, we’ve managed to further reduce this by
half.
Google webspam trends and how we fought webspam in 2017
As we continued to improve, spammers also evolved. One of the trends in 2017 was an increase in
website hacking—both for spamming search ranking and for spreading malware. Hacked websites are
serious threats to users because hackers can take complete control of a site, deface home pages,
erase relevant content, or insert malware and harmful code. They may also record keystrokes,
stealing login credentials for online banking or financial transactions. In 2017 we focused on
reducing this threat, and were able to detect and remove from search results more than 80
percent of these sites. But hacking is not just a spam problem for search users—it affects the
owners of websites as well. To help website owners keep their websites safe, we created a
hands-on resource to help site owners strengthen their websites’ security
and revamped our
help resources to help site owners recover from a hacked website.
The guides are available in 19 languages.
We’re also recognizing the importance of robust content management systems (CMSs). A large
percentage of websites are run on one of several popular CMSs, and subsequently spammers
exploited them by finding ways to abuse their provisions for user-generated content, such as
posting spam content in comment sections or forums. We’re working closely with many of the
providers of popular content management systems like WordPress and Joomla to help them also
fight spammers that abuse their forums, comment sections, and websites.
Another abuse vector is the manipulation of links, which is one of the foundation ranking
signals for Search. In 2017, we doubled down our effort in removing
unnatural links via ranking
improvements and scalable manual actions. We have observed a year-over-year reduction of spam
links by almost half.
Working with users and webmasters for a better web
We’re here to listen: Our automated systems are constantly working to detect and block spam.
Still, we always welcome hearing from you when something seems…phishy. Last year, we were
able to take action on nearly 90,000
user reports of search
spam.
Reporting spam, malware and other issues you find helps us protect the site owner and other
searchers from this abuse. You can file a
spam report, a
phishing report
or a malware report. We very
much appreciate these reports—a big THANK YOU to all of you who submitted them.
We also actively work with site owners to maintain the health of the web ecosystem. Last year,
we sent 45 million messages to registered website owners via
Search Console
letting them know about issues we identified with their websites. More than 6 million of these
messages are related to
manual actions,
providing transparency to site owners so they understand why their sites got manual actions and
how to resolve the issue.
Last year, we
released a beta version
of a new Search Console to a limited number of users and afterwards, to all users of Search
Console. We listened to what matters most to the users, and started with popular
functionalities such as
Search performance,
Index Coverage
and others. These can help site owners optimize their websites’ Google Search presence more easily.
Through enhanced Safe Browsing
protections, we continue to protect more users from bad actors online. In the last year, we
have made significant improvements to our safe browsing protection, such as broadening our
protection of macOS devices,
enabling
predictive phishing protection
in Chrome, cracked down on
mobile unwanted software,
and launched significant improvements to our ability to protect users from
deceptive Chrome extension installation.
We have a multitude of channels to engage directly with site owners. We have dedicated team
members who meet with site owners regularly both online and in-person. We conducted more than
250
online office hours, online events and offline events
around the world in more than 60 cities to audiences totaling over 220,000 website owners and
digital marketers. In addition, our
official support forum
has answered a high volume of questions in many languages. Last year, the forum had 63,000
threads generating over 280,000 contributing posts by 100+
Top Contributors
globally. For more details, see this
post. Apart from the
forums,
blog
and
the SEO starter guide, the
Google Webmaster YouTube channel
is another channel to find more tips and insights. We launched a new
SEO snippets
video series to help with short and to-the-point answers to specific questions. Be sure to subscribe to the
channel!
Despite all these improvements, we know we’re not yet done. We’re relentless in our pursue of
a user experience without abuse, and will keep improving our collaboration with the ecosystem to
make it happen.
How we apply this
We archive Search Central announcements because client questions often trace back to a change that was announced years ago. Reading the original is faster than reconstructing it from second-hand summaries.
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