Google sent 4 million messages about search spam last year, saw 33% increase in clean-up requests

Google announced today the latest in their efforts to clean up the search results through webspam techniques. Google explained that in 2015 they saw a 180-percent increase in websites being hacked compared to 2014 and also saw “an increase in the number of sites with thin, low-quality content.”

To combat that, Google released their hacked spam algorithm in October 2015, which resulted in removing “the vast majority” of those issues. They also sent out more than 4.3 million messages to webmasters to notify them of manual actions on their sites; that is a ton of manual notices. With that, they saw a 33-percent increase in the number of sites that went through the reconsideration process. So it is clearly important to make sure to verify your website in the Google Search Console so that you can be alerted of any issues Google finds on your site.

Google also said that users submitted more than 400,000 spam reports. Google acted on 65 percent of them and considered 80 percent of those acted upon to be spam. They put together more than 200 Hangouts on air to help webmasters with search and webmaster questions in more than 17 languages, as well as increased the participation in their webmaster help forums.

You can read the full report over here.