Google says 99% of search results are now “spam free”, after it made further improvements to the machine learning systems that detect and remove manipulative sites last year.
In its latest annual Webspam Report, Google revealed that it was able to identify spam sites at a rate six times higher than that of 2021, as it continues to work hard to deliver relevant, informative content to users.
Powering Google’s efforts to improve the quality of search results is SpamBrain, an AI-based system that was first launched four years ago and now finally has an official name.
Google says developments to the performance of SpamBrain are ongoing and helped the system to reduce the number of spammy results by 40% in 2021, compared to a year earlier.
SpamBrain is becoming more sophisticated at detecting different forms of spam too, with “gibberish spam” and “hacked spam” seeing a 70% and 75% reduction, respectively, during the last 12 months.
Spam in SEO is defined a bit differently to the term that is used in emails, though in all cases, it is not a desirable trait.
In search, spammy results are linked to sites that use black hat SEO techniques, such as adding a huge number of keywords in web copy, to influence rankings in SERPs.
Google knows these underhand tactics lead to very poor user experiences and are more likely to frustrate users rather than answer their queries, so it tries to root them out quickly.
Recently, it has tried to identify those cases of spam that are less overt but still “manipulative in nature”.
This has been a success and has reduced the number of low-quality product review in pages in particular and promoted “better content and expertise” instead.
With Google making a concerted effort to get rid of spam, marketers should focus their efforts on using white hat SEO strategies to rank pages in the right way, organically.
