Google: We sent 9M web spam messages in 2016, more than double 2015 total

Google released its annual web spam report yesterday, documenting some of the company’s spam-fighting activity in 2016.

One of the most eye-catching data points for me was that Google has sent out over 9 million messages related to web spam in 2016; that number was more than double the 4.3 million messages in the 2015 report. The other metric that stood out was that hacked sites continue to rise, this time by 32 percent from 2015 to 2016, but it was a 180 percent increase from 2014 to 2015 in the previous report.

Here are some data highlights from this year’s report:

• 32 percent increase in hacked sites compared to 2015
• Over 9 million messages sent to webmasters to notify them of webs pam issues on their sites
• Structured data manual actions taken on more than 10,000 sites
• Over 180,000 user-submitted spam reports from around the world, down from 400,000 the year before
• Of those 180,000 spam reports, 52 percent of those reported sites considered to be spam
• More than 170 Google online office hours and live events around the world to audiences totaling over 150,000 website owners, webmasters and digital marketers
• More than 67,000 questions in the Google support forums

Google also noted in this report that they made the Penguin algorithm real-time in 2016.