Google says that it removed 25bn pages of spam from search results every single day last year as part of its continued efforts to serve up relevant content to users online.
A new report released by the tech giant this week shows that search results are now in a good place as more than 99% of listings are entirely spam free.
Google says that billions of spam pages are flagged and then filtered out of the search results index on a daily basis.
“That’s a lot of spam and it goes to show the scale, persistence, and the lengths that spammers are willing to go,” Google noted.
It added that it continues to take the removal of low-quality pages very seriously.
The vast majority of its efforts are supported by a combination of machine learning and its “proven” manual enforcement capacity.
There has also been a helping hand from the public.
Google received almost 230,000 reports from users about spam during 2019.
It was then able to remove pages related to 82% of the reports logged.
User-generated spam has been particularly problematic during the last few years, but Google has finally been able to rein in its presence.
User-generated spam totals were cut by 80% in 2018 and did not increase at all last year.
There have also been improvements in clamping down on link spam after 90% of it was caught by Google’s systems.
Egregious tactics such as link exchange and paid links are also now less effective.
Google’s efforts on the frontline to make spam less of an issue are paying dividends and will continue to do so.
Google search liaison Danny Sullivan concluded that without its systems, the quality of search would be negatively affected and users would find it much more difficult to access the content they need.
