Google released its 2017 webspam report, showing how it has improved in removing spam from its search results.
"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," said Google.
In 2017, Google saw an increase in website hacking, which spams search ranking and spreading malware.
"Hacked websites are serious threats to users because hackers can take complete control of a site, deface homepages, erase relevant content, or insert malware and harmful code. They may also record keystrokes, stealing login credentials for online banking or financial transactions," continued Google.
But the company was able to detect these threats, and removed 80 percent of those sites from its search results.
This dropped the number of Search Console notifications from 9 million in 2016 to 6 million.
Other highlights include:
- Google in doubling down its effort on removing unnatural links.
- Link spam reduction year over year dropped by almost half.
- 90,000 user reports of search spam were processed.
- 45 million messages were sent to registered website owners to notify them about issues.
- More than 6 million of these messages were related to manual actions.
Because a large portion of the web is powered by content management systems (CMSs), spammers have increased their attempts in exploiting them by finding ways to abuse their provisions for user-generated content, such as posting spam comments.
"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."
