Google Webspam Report, 2017: 80% of Hacked Sites removed from SERPs

[engine]

Google has published its webspam report for 2017. These are sites which abuse or violate its webmaster guidelines, and those that might have been hacked and infected with malware.
Google says it removed more than 80% of hacked sites from the SERPs last year.

The company also said it put greater effort into discovering and removing unnatural links through "ranking improvements" and "scalable manual actions," resulting in a year-on-year reduction of spam links by almost half. Just a guess, but I suspect they are using much more AI through machine learning to achieve this.

Users reported search spam almost 90,000 times, allowing Google to evaluate and act as required.

In 2017 it also sent 45 million messages to webmasters via the search console, with over 6 million of those related to manual actions.
[webmasters.googleblog.com...]

[keyplyr]

removed more than 80% of hacked sites

Which leaves the question... why did they leave 20% in the SERP?

(just playing devil's advocate)

[heyday]

It's about time.... I've been having people steal my software thanks to Google for years and years....I've complained to them so many times.

Crazy it took them this long

[lucy24]

why did they leave 20% in the SERP?

I was hoping it meant that 20% of hackees took successful steps to get rid of the hack and restore their sites to their intended form before G### had time to take irreversible steps. The other 80% were presumably WordPress sites.

[keyplyr]

@heyday - I don't think the report is saying that hacking has been stopped, or even reduced... only that 80% of hacked websites have been removed from the Google Search Index.