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Google has released their webspam report for 2016, sharing some interesting data points. Such as that Google sent out 9 million messages to site owners about spam issues on their sites.
That 9 million metric the year before was 4.3 million messages. So Google sent out over double those messages year over year, 2016 over 2015.
Another interesting metric was that Google received "over 180,000 user-submitted spam reports" in 2016, the year before it was over 400,000 spam reports. That was a huge drop in users submitting spam reports to Google year over year. And f those reports, in 2016 Google only considered 52% of those reported sites to be spam, whereas in 2015, they acted on 65% of them but of those 65% they considered 80% of those acted upon to be spam. See, the numbers can be a bit confusing to compare.
Google also touted making the Penguin algorithm real time, taking a big step on manual actions around structured data, taking "manual actions on more than 10,000 sites that did not meet the quality guidelines for inclusion" and seeing a 32% increase in hacked sites compared to 2015.
Don't you just love these data points?
Forum discussion at Google+.
