Google web spam report: Less than 1% of sites visited from search results are spammy

Google released its 2017 webspam report this morning. The metrics show improvements from last year’s report in several areas.

For example, Google said that less than 1 percent of searchers ended up visiting a spammy website from the Google search results. And it reduced that figure by half in just a couple of years.

Google cut the number of hacked websites from showing in the search results by 80 percent, and cut link spam in search by almost half. As we covered recently, the number of Search Console notifications dropped to 6 million from 9 million the year before.

Google says its spam teams “doubled down” on removing unnatural links using algorithms and “scalable” manual actions.

Here are some of the highlights from the report:

• Less than 1 percent of sites visited from search results are spammy — and that’s been the case “for many years”.
• There was an 80 percent reduction of hacked sites in search results.
• Google doubled down on removing unnatural links via algorithms and manual actions.
• Link spam reduction year over year dropped by almost half.
• 90,000 user reports of search spam were acted on.
• 45 million messages were sent to registered website owners via Search Console.
• Six million of these messages are related to manual actions.

For more details, check out the Google blog post.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.