Google released their web spam report for 2017 just now, as I reported at Search Engine Land. The two most shocking numbers released in this report were (a) link spam and (b) the number of people who landed on spammy results.
Huge Link Spam Reductions
Google said that they "doubled down" on their effort in removing unnatural links via ranking (algorithms) improvements and "scalable" manual actions. Google said this resulted in "a year-over-year reduction of spam links by almost half." I am not sure how they measured this but that is quiet impressive.
Less Than One-Percent End On Spammy Results
Google said that "less than 1 percent of search results users visited are spammy." That means that Google's confidence in their search results is super high. To only half less than 1% of your searchers end up on a spammy page, is very impressive. Of course, we do not know how they classify what a spammy page is. But nevertheless, that metric is insane.
In addition, Google said "in the last couple of years, we’ve managed to further reduce this by half." Again, that is amazing.
Some of the other metrics we already covered here just a couple weeks ago.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
