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Google recently discovered that more than 25 billion spammy pages are found, according to its annual webspam report. The company also published a companion post highlighting the reasons why it is so important to keep spam out of the search results.

Let's first look at what exactly is spam. 'Spam’ are basically some using techniques that attempt to mimic the high quality content signals without actually delivering and standing up to the promise of high quality content on the web. In simple words, they are the those tactics that might prove to be very harmful to searchers.

How To Help Google Identify Webspam

Everyone who uses the web or surfs on the net knows how frustrating it is to land on a page that sounds to be promising in the search results but end up being useless when you actually visit those pages. Google said that they work very hard to make sure that its algorithms catch as much as possible, but sometimes the spammy websites still make it into the search results at the top. Google appreciates the numerous spam reports sent in by users who face such type of issues and decide to stand up against it. The reports help Google to improve its search results and make sure that only great content is treated the way it deserves to be treated. Good spam reports are important to them Here’s how to maximize the impact of any spam in order to know if there are any loopholes in the system and if there's room for improvement.

Why Report Spam To Google?

Google’s search quality team uses spam reports for further enhancing the quality of the results that are shown, to render a level playing field for webmasters, and to help with the scalable spam fighting efforts as well. With the release of new tools and technologies such as our Chrome extension to report spam, we have seen people filing much more spam reports than ever before. Also, we have to allocate specific resources to spam reports that are most likely to be helpful.

Spam reports are basically prioritized by looking at how much visibility a potentially spammy website has in the search results, with the aim to help us focus on high impact websites in a timely manner. For example, we are likely to prioritize the investigation of a website that regularly ranks on the first or second page on the Google SERP over that of a website that only gets a few search impressions every month. A spam report for a web page that is almost not visible by surfers and users is very less likely to be reviewed compared to the higher impact pages or web sites.

Google Stops Spam

In majority of the cases, Google automatically identifies the spammy behavior and makes sure that those pages do not rank well in the search results. Google also uses human analysts to find out if the content in their page or sites are spammy. The human review process then often leads to the enhanced automated systems. Google looks to comprehend how that spam got past their systems and then works to improve the detection, so that they catch those very cases and automatically verify many other similar cases overall on the net.

Spammy content is often removed or rather deleted completely from the Search Engine Results Page. Google may also give those spammy site owners, an opportunity to resolve the issues by sending them correct manual actions through the tool- Google Search Console.

Highlights From The Webspam Report

Below mentioned are some figures that the company emphasized on in its report of Webscam:

Google says that its efforts make sure that more than 99% of the visits from its search results lead to spam free experiences.

Paid links and link exchanges, both have been made less effective, with Google catching more than 90% of the link spam.

Google received nearly about 2,30,000 search spam reports in the year 2019 and was able to take necessary action on 82% of the whole.

The company generated over 90 million messages to the site owners about issues that may affect their website’s appearance in the search results as well as the potential changes of improvement.

Around 4.3 million messages were sent regarding the manual actions resulting from the Webmaster Guidelines violations.

Why We Care?

Left unchecked, spam really hurts the entire search ecosystem, including the searchers and legitimate websites that appear in the results. A spam free experience also increases the likelihood that the users will continue to rely on Google and this will be beneficial for all.