Google Webspam Report 2021 Published

[engine]

Google has just published its 2021 Webspam Report, which describes how it "fought Search spam."

It's using an AI-based anti-spam tool called SpamBrain, which it started using in 2018, and since 2020 has picked up more than six times the spam sites, with hacked spam down 70%, and "gibberish spam on hosting platforms down 75%. It claims this has resulted in keeping 99% of search spam-free.

Google has also worked on reducing the effects of "low quality content ranking and manipulations by fighting behaviours that attempt to narrowly avoid violating" its quality guidelines, but are manipulative in a way to "degrade the user experience."

It went on to say it was making significant progress in "fighting link spam scams, and online harassment." This work resulted in a 40% reduction of "scammy results."

Links still help us discover and rank results in meaningful ways, and we made a lot of progress in 2021 to protect this core signal. We launched a link spam update to broadly identify unnatural links and prevent them from affecting search quality.

Read the full report [developers.google.com...]

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

To fight spam on "hacked platforms" it would need to identify the platform, hence all the calls to seemingly random files?

Anyway, it seems to have completely missed the biggest spam sites 250,000 pages in size getting 5 million monthly visits despite being 100% script, with some spun content, and full page iframes as "source" links.

The report doesn't mention sites it assumed were spam but weren't, what's the false positive rate and what can owners do about it? Or even know?

There's still much improvement needed.

[Broaster]

Why doesn't google just go back to their original search format it was better and an even playing field, to stop content theft award the person who published the article first instead of the copy scraper who steals it.

I miss google search when I would type keywords in they would show so many different types of websites, now you type in keywords and almost every single top position is a big corporation or website that is making million of dollars, no more little guys or random websites.