Google has released the 2019 version of the yearly Google web spam report. We have covered it the past couple of years; 2018 and 2017 versions. This year, Google said all is good and the preventive spam efforts resulted in "more than 99% of visits from our results lead to spam-free experiences."
Yes, 99%+. In fact, Google said it observed and I guess prevented "more than 25 billion pages we discover each day are spammy."
Google also said compared to last year, user-generated spam did not see an increase this year. Link spam was an issue but Google said "more than 90% of link spam was caught by" Google's systems, these systems made these "techniques such as paid links or link exchange have been made less effective." Hacked spam is also less of an issue, according to Google, which is a really good thing.
Google said that in 2019 it was "able to reduce the impact on Search users from this type of spam by more than 60% compared to 2018."
Google "received nearly 230,000 reports of search spam in 2019" and it took "take action on 82% of those reports we processed," so Google took action on 188,600 of these reports. This is more than last year where Google said it received 180,000 reports and in 2017 it received 90,000 reports - the trend of reporting spam has increased year-over-year for at least the past few years. Google also sent out 90 million messages to website owners through Search Console and other means.
Also, Danny Sullivan wrote on the Google blog Why keeping spam out of Search is so important.
Seems like search spam keeps Google busy...
Forum discussion at Twitter.
