Google Webspam Report 2017

Webspam Report – Google Reduces Spam Links By Nearly Half

Google’s annual Webspam Report has recently been released, highlighting a series of statistics from their battle against “web spam” throughout 2017.

What is Web Spam?

Google defines “spam” as any action which violates the Webmaster Guidelines. The amount of spam sites currently in search results is said to equate to around 0.5% of listings.

What’s In The Report?

The report gives details on the proactive efforts made by Google to help protect website owners from the attacks of what they call “bad actors”. These are people who attempt to manipulate search rankings and website content in order to make a profit.

Website hacking is reported to be one of the trends seen throughout 2017 for both spamming search ranking results and spreading malware internally. This is seen to be a serious problem as “bad actors” can take complete control of a site to edit / remove content or even record keystrokes made by visitors which can include personal and sensitive data. To counter this Google claims to have detected and removed 80% of hacked sites from it’s search results.

Additionally throughout the year Google “doubled down” their efforts to remove unnatural links via ranking improvements and manual actions. This has seen a spam link reduction of almost half year on year. A further positive to out of the report is Google have listened to users and have taken action against nearly 90,000 user reports of spam search.

What About The Rest of 2018?

While we don’t know exactly what Google will tackle in 2018, they have said that they are not done yet and are relentless in their pursuit of an abuse-free user experience. Check out our other blog posts to learn more about the world of SEO and Search Marketing.