Google’s global search outreach lead Juan Felipe Rincon has shared some updated metrics on Google’s spam-preventive measures over the past year. The interesting data point is that Google sent around 3 million fewer manual action notices this year than last year.
Last year, Google told us it sent 9 million web spam notices through Google Search Console. This year, that number dropped down to “6 million manual action messages to webmasters about practices we identified that were against our guidelines,” Google wrote. In 2016, that metric was closer to 4 million notifications related to search spam.
Google also sent “over 45 million notifications to registered website owners alerting them to possible problems with their websites which could affect their appearance in search,” but not all of those are related to search spam. In fact, only 6 million of those were search spam-related.
Here are some other data points about Google’s webmaster efforts over the past year:
- Google produced over 250+ webmaster meetups and office hours around the world.
- Those meetups and office hours reached more than 220,000 website owners.
- Google sent over 45 million notifications to registered website owners alerting them to possible problems with their websites which could affect their appearance in search.
- Google sent about 6 million manual action messages to webmasters about practices they identified that were against their guidelines, along with information on how to resolve the issue.
- Google was able to detect and remove more than 80 percent of compromised and hacked sites from search results.
- Google took action on about 90,000 user reports of search spam submitted through their spam reporting tools.
For more details, check out the Google blog post.
About The Author
Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land’s News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.