Tag Archives: webmaster guidelines

How we fought Search spam on Google – Webspam Report 2019



Every search matters. That is why whenever you come to Google Search to find relevant and useful information, it is our ongoing commitment to make sure users receive the highest quality results possible.

Unfortunately, on the web there are some disruptive behaviors and content that we call "webspam" that can degrade the experience for people coming to find helpful information. We have a number of teams who work to prevent webspam from appearing in your search results, and it’s a constant challenge to stay ahead of the spammers. At the same time, we continue to engage with webmasters to ensure they’re following best practices and can find success on Search, making great content available on the open web.

Looking back at last year, here’s a snapshot of how we fought spam on Search in 2019, and how we supported the webmaster community.

Fighting Spam at Scale

With hundreds of billions of webpages in our index serving billions of queries every day, perhaps it’s not too surprising that there continue to be bad actors who try to manipulate search ranking. In fact, we observed that more than 25 Billion pages we discover each day are spammy. That’s a lot of spam and it goes to show the scale, persistence, and the lengths that spammers are willing to go. We’re very serious about making sure that your chance of encountering spammy pages in Search is as small as possible. Our efforts have helped ensure that more than 99% of visits from our results lead to spam-free experiences.

Updates from last year

In 2018, we reported that we had reduced user-generated spam by 80%, and we’re happy to confirm that this type of abuse did not grow in 2019. Link spam continued to be a popular form of spam, but our team was successful in containing its impact in 2019. More than 90% of link spam was caught by our systems, and techniques such as paid links or link exchange have been made less effective.

Hacked spam, while still a commonly observed challenge, has been more stable compared to previous years. We continued to work on solutions to better detect and notify affected webmasters and platforms and help them recover from hacked websites.

Spam Trends

One of our top priorities in 2019 was improving our spam fighting capabilities through machine learning systems. Our machine learning solutions, combined with our proven and time-tested manual enforcement capability, have been instrumental in identifying and preventing spammy results from being served to users.

In the last few years, we’ve observed an increase in spammy sites with auto-generated and scraped content with behaviors that annoy or harm searchers, such as fake buttons, overwhelming ads, suspicious redirects and malware. These websites are often deceptive and offer no real value to people. In 2019, we were able to reduce the impact on Search users from this type of spam by more than 60% compared to 2018.

As we improve our capability and efficiency in catching spam, we’re continuously investing in reducing broader types of harm, like scams and fraud. These sites trick people into thinking they’re visiting an official or authoritative site and in many cases, people can end up disclosing sensitive personal information, losing money, or infecting their devices with malware. We have been paying close attention to queries that are prone to scam and fraud and we’ve worked to stay ahead of spam tactics in those spaces to protect users.

Working with webmasters and developers for a better web

Much of the work we do to fight against spam is using automated systems to detect spammy behavior, but those systems aren’t perfect and can’t catch everything. As someone who uses Search, you can also help us fight spam and other issues by reporting spam on search, phishing or malware. We received nearly 230,000 reports of search spam in 2019, and we were able to take action on 82% of those reports we processed. We appreciate all the reports you sent to us and your help in keeping search results clean!

So what do we do when we get those reports or identify that something isn’t quite right? An important part of what we do is notifying webmasters when we detect something wrong with their website. In 2019, we generated more than 90 million messages to website owners to let them know about issues, problems that may affect their site’s appearance on Search results and potential improvements that can be implemented. Of all messages, about 4.3 million were related to manual actions, resulting from violations of our Webmaster Guidelines.

And we’re always looking for ways to better help site owners. There were many initiatives in 2019 aimed at improving communications, such as the new Search Console messages, Site Kit for WordPress sites or the Auto-DNS verification in the new Search Console. We hope that these initiatives have equipped webmasters with more convenient ways to get their sites verified and will continue to be helpful. We also hope this provides quicker access to news and that webmasters will be able to fix webspam issues or hack issues more effectively and efficiently.

While we deeply focused on cleaning up spam, we also didn’t forget to keep up with the evolution of the web and rethought how we wanted to treat “nofollow” links. Originally introduced as a means to help fight comment spam and annotate sponsored links, the “nofollow” attribute has come a long way. But we’re not stopping there. We believe it’s time for it to evolve even more, just as how our spam fighting capability has evolved. We introduced two new link attributes, rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc", that provide webmasters with additional ways to identify to Google Search the nature of particular links. Along with rel="nofollow", we began treating these as hints for us to incorporate for ranking purposes. We are very excited to see that these new rel attributes were well received and adopted by webmasters around the world!

Engaging with the community

As always, we’re grateful for all the opportunities we had last year to connect with webmasters around the world, helping them improve their presence in Search and hearing feedback. We delivered more than 150 online office hours, online events and offline events in many cities across the globe to a wide range of audience including SEOs, developers, online marketers and business owners. Among those events, we have been delighted by the momentum behind our Webmaster Conferences in 35 locations across 15 countries and 12 languages around the world, including the first Product Summit version in Mountain View. While we’re not currently able to host in-person events, we look forward to more of these events and virtual touchpoints in the future.

Webmasters continued to find solutions and tips on our Webmasters Help Community with more than 30,000 threads in 2019 in more than a dozen languages. On YouTube, we launched #AskGoogleWebmasters as well as series such as SEO mythbusting to ensure that your questions get answered and your uncertainties get clarified.

We know that our journey to better web with you is ongoing and we would love to continue this with you in the year to come! Therefore, do keep in touch on Twitter, YouTube, blog, Help Community or see you in person at one of our conferences near you!





Posted by Cherry Prommawin, Search Relations, and Duy Nguyen, Search Quality Analyst

How we fought Search spam on Google – Webspam Report 2019



Every search matters. That is why whenever you come to Google Search to find relevant and useful information, it is our ongoing commitment to make sure users receive the highest quality results possible.

Unfortunately, on the web there are some disruptive behaviors and content that we call "webspam" that can degrade the experience for people coming to find helpful information. We have a number of teams who work to prevent webspam from appearing in your search results, and it’s a constant challenge to stay ahead of the spammers. At the same time, we continue to engage with webmasters to ensure they’re following best practices and can find success on Search, making great content available on the open web.

Looking back at last year, here’s a snapshot of how we fought spam on Search in 2019, and how we supported the webmaster community.

Fighting Spam at Scale

With hundreds of billions of webpages in our index serving billions of queries every day, perhaps it’s not too surprising that there continue to be bad actors who try to manipulate search ranking. In fact, we observed that more than 25 Billion pages we discover each day are spammy. That’s a lot of spam and it goes to show the scale, persistence, and the lengths that spammers are willing to go. We’re very serious about making sure that your chance of encountering spammy pages in Search is as small as possible. Our efforts have helped ensure that more than 99% of visits from our results lead to spam-free experiences.

Updates from last year

In 2018, we reported that we had reduced user-generated spam by 80%, and we’re happy to confirm that this type of abuse did not grow in 2019. Link spam continued to be a popular form of spam, but our team was successful in containing its impact in 2019. More than 90% of link spam was caught by our systems, and techniques such as paid links or link exchange have been made less effective.

Hacked spam, while still a commonly observed challenge, has been more stable compared to previous years. We continued to work on solutions to better detect and notify affected webmasters and platforms and help them recover from hacked websites.

Spam Trends

One of our top priorities in 2019 was improving our spam fighting capabilities through machine learning systems. Our machine learning solutions, combined with our proven and time-tested manual enforcement capability, have been instrumental in identifying and preventing spammy results from being served to users.

In the last few years, we’ve observed an increase in spammy sites with auto-generated and scraped content with behaviors that annoy or harm searchers, such as fake buttons, overwhelming ads, suspicious redirects and malware. These websites are often deceptive and offer no real value to people. In 2019, we were able to reduce the impact on Search users from this type of spam by more than 60% compared to 2018.

As we improve our capability and efficiency in catching spam, we’re continuously investing in reducing broader types of harm, like scams and fraud. These sites trick people into thinking they’re visiting an official or authoritative site and in many cases, people can end up disclosing sensitive personal information, losing money, or infecting their devices with malware. We have been paying close attention to queries that are prone to scam and fraud and we’ve worked to stay ahead of spam tactics in those spaces to protect users.

Working with webmasters and developers for a better web

Much of the work we do to fight against spam is using automated systems to detect spammy behavior, but those systems aren’t perfect and can’t catch everything. As someone who uses Search, you can also help us fight spam and other issues by reporting spam on search, phishing or malware. We received nearly 230,000 reports of search spam in 2019, and we were able to take action on 82% of those reports we processed. We appreciate all the reports you sent to us and your help in keeping search results clean!

So what do we do when we get those reports or identify that something isn’t quite right? An important part of what we do is notifying webmasters when we detect something wrong with their website. In 2019, we generated more than 90 million messages to website owners to let them know about issues, problems that may affect their site’s appearance on Search results and potential improvements that can be implemented. Of all messages, about 4.3 million were related to manual actions, resulting from violations of our Webmaster Guidelines.

And we’re always looking for ways to better help site owners. There were many initiatives in 2019 aimed at improving communications, such as the new Search Console messages, Site Kit for WordPress sites or the Auto-DNS verification in the new Search Console. We hope that these initiatives have equipped webmasters with more convenient ways to get their sites verified and will continue to be helpful. We also hope this provides quicker access to news and that webmasters will be able to fix webspam issues or hack issues more effectively and efficiently.

While we deeply focused on cleaning up spam, we also didn’t forget to keep up with the evolution of the web and rethought how we wanted to treat “nofollow” links. Originally introduced as a means to help fight comment spam and annotate sponsored links, the “nofollow” attribute has come a long way. But we’re not stopping there. We believe it’s time for it to evolve even more, just as how our spam fighting capability has evolved. We introduced two new link attributes, rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc", that provide webmasters with additional ways to identify to Google Search the nature of particular links. Along with rel="nofollow", we began treating these as hints for us to incorporate for ranking purposes. We are very excited to see that these new rel attributes were well received and adopted by webmasters around the world!

Engaging with the community

As always, we’re grateful for all the opportunities we had last year to connect with webmasters around the world, helping them improve their presence in Search and hearing feedback. We delivered more than 150 online office hours, online events and offline events in many cities across the globe to a wide range of audience including SEOs, developers, online marketers and business owners. Among those events, we have been delighted by the momentum behind our Webmaster Conferences in 35 locations across 15 countries and 12 languages around the world, including the first Product Summit version in Mountain View. While we’re not currently able to host in-person events, we look forward to more of these events and virtual touchpoints in the future.

Webmasters continued to find solutions and tips on our Webmasters Help Community with more than 30,000 threads in 2019 in more than a dozen languages. On YouTube, we launched #AskGoogleWebmasters as well as series such as SEO mythbusting to ensure that your questions get answered and your uncertainties get clarified.

We know that our journey to better web with you is ongoing and we would love to continue this with you in the year to come! Therefore, do keep in touch on Twitter, YouTube, blog, Help Community or see you in person at one of our conferences near you!





Posted by Cherry Prommawin, Search Relations, and Duy Nguyen, Search Quality Analyst

Video Series for New Webmasters: Search for Beginners!

We are excited to introduce our newest video series: “Search For Beginners”! The series was created primarily to help new webmasters. It is also for anyone with an interest in Search or anyone who is still learning about the Web and how to manage their online presence.

We love to see the webmaster community grow! Every day, there are countless new webmasters who are taking the first steps in learning how Search works, and how to make their websites perform well and discoverable on Search. We understand that it sometimes can be challenging or even overwhelming to start with our existing content without some prior knowledge or basic understandings of the Web. We find our basic videos in our YouTube channels to be the ones with the most views. At the same time, advanced webmasters also see the need for content that can be sent to clients or stakeholders to help explain important concepts in managing an online presence.

We want to help all webmasters succeed, regardless of whether you have been managing websites for many years or you’ve just started out yesterday. We want to do more to help the new webmasters and this video series will hopefully help us achieve that.

Introduction to the series:

Episode 1:

The “Search For Beginners” video series covers basic online presence topics ranging from ‘Do you need a website?’, ‘What are the goals for your website?’ to more organic search-related topics such as ‘How does Google Search work?’, ‘How to change description line’, or ‘How to change wrong address information on Google’. Actually, we get asked these questions frequently in forums, social channels and at events around the world! The videos are fully animated. The videos are in English with subtitles available in Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, and English. We are working on more, so please stay tuned!

And if you consider yourself a more experienced user, please feel free to use these videos to support your pitches or explaining things to your clients. If you want to share any ideas or learnings, please leave them in the comment section in each video so that others can benefit from your knowledge and experience.

Follow us on Twitter and subscribe on YouTube for the upcoming videos! We will be adding new videos in this series to this playlist about every two weeks!

Posted by Cherry Prommawin, Search Quality Analyst

Video Series for New Webmasters: Search for Beginners!

We are excited to introduce our newest video series: “Search For Beginners”! The series was created primarily to help new webmasters. It is also for anyone with an interest in Search or anyone who is still learning about the Web and how to manage their online presence.

We love to see the webmaster community grow! Every day, there are countless new webmasters who are taking the first steps in learning how Search works, and how to make their websites perform well and discoverable on Search. We understand that it sometimes can be challenging or even overwhelming to start with our existing content without some prior knowledge or basic understandings of the Web. We find our basic videos in our YouTube channels to be the ones with the most views. At the same time, advanced webmasters also see the need for content that can be sent to clients or stakeholders to help explain important concepts in managing an online presence.

We want to help all webmasters succeed, regardless of whether you have been managing websites for many years or you’ve just started out yesterday. We want to do more to help the new webmasters and this video series will hopefully help us achieve that.

Introduction to the series:

Episode 1:

The “Search For Beginners” video series covers basic online presence topics ranging from ‘Do you need a website?’, ‘What are the goals for your website?’ to more organic search-related topics such as ‘How does Google Search work?’, ‘How to change description line’, or ‘How to change wrong address information on Google’. Actually, we get asked these questions frequently in forums, social channels and at events around the world! The videos are fully animated. The videos are in English with subtitles available in Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, and English. We are working on more, so please stay tuned!

And if you consider yourself a more experienced user, please feel free to use these videos to support your pitches or explaining things to your clients. If you want to share any ideas or learnings, please leave them in the comment section in each video so that others can benefit from your knowledge and experience.

Follow us on Twitter and subscribe on YouTube for the upcoming videos! We will be adding new videos in this series to this playlist about every two weeks!

Posted by Cherry Prommawin, Search Quality Analyst

This year in Search Spam – Webspam report 2018

Google aims to provide the highest quality results for any search. As part of this, we take action to prevent what we call “webspam” from degrading the search experience, content and behaviors that violate our webmaster guidelines. Our efforts help ensure that well under 1 percent of results visited by users are for spammy pages. Here’s more about how we fought webspam in 2018.



Google webspam trends and how we fought webspam in 2018



Of the types of spam we fought in 2018, three continue to stand out:


Spam on hacked websites: We reported in 2017 that we had seen a substantial reduction of spam from hacked websites in search results. This trend continued in 2018, with faster discovery of hacked web pages before they affect search results or put someone in harm’s way.   While we reduced how spam on hacked sites affects search, hacked websites remain a major security problem affecting the safety of the web. Even though we can’t prevent a website hack from happening, we’re committed to helping webmasters whose websites have been compromised by offering resources to help them recover from a hacked website. 


User-generated spam: A particular type of spam known as User-generated spam has been a continued focus for us. User-generated spam includes spammy posts on forums, as well as spammy accounts on free blogs and platforms, none of which are meant to be consumed by human beings, and all of which disrupt conversations while adding no value to users. In 2018, we were able to reduce the impact on search users from this type of spam by more than 80%. While we can’t prevent websites from being exploited, we do want to make it easier for website owners to learn how to protect themselves, which is why we provide resources on how to prevent abuse of your site’s public areas.


Link spam: We continued to protect the value of authoritative and relevant links as an important ranking signal for Search. We continued to deal swiftly with egregious link spam, and made a number of bad linking practices less effective for manipulating ranking. Above all, we continued to engage with webmasters and SEOs to chip away at the many myths that have emerged over the years relating to linking practices. We continued to remind website owners that if you simply stay away from building links mainly as an attempt to rank better and focus on creating great content, you should not have to worry about any of the myths or realities. We think that one of the best ways of fighting spam of all types is by encouraging website owners to just create great quality content. Resources such as the SEO starter-guide highlight best practices and bust some common myths and misconceptions related to what it takes to appear well in Google Search results. Reporting link spam is also a great way to assist us in fighting against this type of abuse and to help preserve fairness in Search ranking.



Working with users, webmasters and developers for a better web

Everyday users continue to help us find spam, malware and other issues in Search that escape our filters and processes by reporting spam on search, reporting phishing or  reporting malware. We received over 180,000 search spam user reports and we were able to take action on 64% of the reports we processed. These reports truly make a difference and we’d like to thank all of you who submitted them. 


We think it’s important to let website owners known when we detect something wrong with their website. In 2018, we generated over 186 million messages to website owners calling out potential improvements, issues and problems that could affect their site’s appearance on Search results. We can only deliver these notifications to site owners that verified their sites in Search Console, and we successfully delivered 96 million of those messages. The rest of the messages will be kept linked with the website for as long as they are relevant, so they can be seen when a webmaster successfully registers their site in Search Console. The majority of these messages were welcoming new users to Search Console, and the second largest group was informing registered Search Console users when Mobile-First Indexing became available. Of all messages, slightly over 2%—about 4 million—were related to manual actions resulting from violations of our Webmaster Guidelines. 


High quality content keeps spam off of search results, and we continued to improve the tools and reports we offer for webmasters that create that content. The Google Search Console was completely rebuilt from the ground up to provide both new and improved reports (Performance, Index Coverage, Links, Mobile Usability report), as well as brand new features (URL Inspection Tool and Site and User management). This improved Search Console graduated out of beta in 2018 and is now available generally to all registered website owners.


We didn’t forget the front-end developers who make the modern web work, and focused on helping them make their sites great for users and also search-friendly regardless of whether they are on a CMS, roll their own CSS and JS, or build on top of a web framework. With the new SEO audit capability in Lighthouse, the open-source and automated auditing tool for improving the quality of web pages, developers and webmasters can now run actionable SEO health-checks on their pages and quickly identify areas for improvement.


We also engage directly with website owners to provide help with thorny issues. Our dedicated team members meet with webmasters around the world regularly, both online and in-person. We delivered more than 190 online office hours, online events and offline events in more than 76 cities, to audiences totaling over 170,000 including SEOs, developers and online marketers. We hosted four search events in Tokyo, Singapore, Zurich and Osaka as well as an 11-city Search Conference in India. In 2018, we started live office hours in Spanish on top of English, French, German, Hindi and Japanese, where Webmasters can find help, tips and useful discussion on our Google Webmaster YouTube channel. Product experts continued to help webmasters find solutions through our official support forums in over a dozen languages. 


We look forward to continuing our work to deliver a spam-free Search experience to all in 2019!


Posted by Juan Felipe Rincón, Webmaster Outreach, Dublin

Help Google Search know the best date for your web page

Sometimes, Google shows dates next to listings in its search results. In this post, we’ll answer some commonly-asked questions webmasters have about how these dates are determined and provide some best practices to help improve their accuracy.

How dates are determined

Google shows the date of a page when its automated systems determine that it would be relevant to do so, such as for pages that can be time-sensitive, including news content:

Google determines a date using a variety of factors, including but not limited to: any prominent date listed on the page itself or dates provided by the publisher through structured markup.

Google doesn’t depend on one single factor because all of them can be prone to issues. Publishers may not always provide a clear visible date. Sometimes, structured data may be lacking or may not be adjusted to the correct time zone. That’s why our systems look at several factors to come up with what we consider to be our best estimate of when a page was published or significantly updated.

How to specify a date on a page

To help Google to pick the right date, site owners and publishers should:

  • Show a clear date: Show a visible date prominently on the page.
  • Use structured data: Use the datePublished and dateModified schema with the correct time zone designator for AMP or non-AMP pages. When using structured data, make sure to use the ISO 8601 format for dates.

Guidelines specific to Google News

Google News requires clearly showing both the date and the time that content was published or updated. Structured data alone is not enough, though it is recommended to use in addition to a visible date and time. Date and time should be positioned between the headline and the article text. For more guidance, also see our help page about article dates.

If an article has been substantially changed, it can make sense to give it a fresh date and time. However, don't artificially freshen a story without adding significant information or some other compelling reason for the freshening. Also, do not create a very slightly updated story from one previously published, then delete the old story and redirect to the new one. That's against our article URLs guidelines.

More best practices for dates on web pages

In addition to the most important requirements listed above, here are additional best practices to help Google determine the best page to consider showing for a web page:

  • Show when a page has been updated: If you update a page significantly, also update the visible date (and time, if you display that). If desired, you can show two dates: when a page was originally published and when it was updated. Just do so in a way that’s visually clear to your readers. If showing both dates, it’s also highly recommended to use datePublished and dateModified for AMP or non-AMP pages to make it easier for algorithms to recognize.
  • Use the right time zone: If specifying a time, make sure to provide the correct timezone, taking into account daylight saving time as appropriate.
  • Be consistent in usage. Within a page, make sure to use exactly the same date (and, potentially, time) in structured data as well as in the visible part of the page. Make sure to use the same timezone if you specify one on the page.
  • Don’t use future dates or dates related to what a page is about: Always use a date for when a page itself was published or updated, not a date linked to something like an event that the page is writing about, especially for events or other subjects that happen in the future (you may use Event markup separately, if appropriate).
  • Follow Google's structured data guidelines: While Google doesn't guarantee that a date (or structured data in general) specified on a page will be used, following our structured data guidelines does help our algorithms to have it available in a machine-readable way.
  • Troubleshoot by minimizing other dates on the page: If you’ve followed the best practices above and find incorrect dates are being selected, consider if you can remove or minimize other dates that may appear on the page, such as those that might be next to related stories.

We hope these guidelines help to make it easier to specify the right date on your website's pages! For questions or comments on this, or other structured data topics, feel free to drop by our webmaster help forums.


Posted by John Mueller, Developer Advocate, Zurich

Notifying users of unclear subscription pages

Every month, millions of Chrome users encounter pages with insufficient mobile subscription information. Surprising charges that come from unclear communication are a poor user experience. That’s why starting from Chrome 71 (December 2018), Chrome will show a warning before these pages, so that users can make informed decisions when signing up to mobile based subscription services. Users will be offered the choice to proceed to the page or go back if they were unaware that they were entering a billing page.

Unclear mobile subscriptions


Picture this: Andrea is browsing the web on a mobile connection to access a gaming page and they’re presented with a page that asks them for their mobile phone details.




They fill in the blanks with their mobile number and press Continue, and get access to the content.

The next month, the phone bill arrives and they see a charge they were not expecting. Was the subscription to the online gaming service really that expensive? Did they really agree to pay that specific price for the service? How much did they agree to be charged to access the content?

Clearer billing information for Chrome users


We want to make sure Chrome users understand when they are going through a billing flow and trust that they’ll be able to make informed decisions while browsing the web.

To adequately inform users, it’s important to provide a sufficient level of details within the billing page as outlined by our new mobile billing charges best practices. Pages that answer positively to the following questions generally provide sufficient information for users:
  • Is the billing information visible and obvious to users? For example, adding no subscription information on the subscription page or hiding the information is a bad start because users should have access to the information when agreeing to subscribe.
  • Can customers easily see the costs they’re going to incur before accepting the terms? For example, displaying the billing information in grey characters over a grey background, therefore making it less readable, is not considered a good user practice.
  • Is the fee structure easily understandable? For example, the formula presented to explain how the cost of the service will be determined should be as simple and straightforward as possible.

If Chrome detects pages that don’t provide sufficient billing information to users, the following warning will be displayed to the user on Chrome mobile, Chrome desktop and Android’s WebView:



The warning will be shown to users entering unclear billing pages.


When we identify such pages, we will notify the webmaster through Search Console where there will be an option to let us know about the changes they’ve made to clarify the billing process. For websites that aren’t verified on Search Console, we will do our best to get in touch with the webmasters affected and will be available to answer questions in our public support forum available in 15 languages. Once an appeal has been sent via Search Console, we will review the changes and remove the warning accordingly.

If your billing service takes users through a clearly visible and understandable billing process as described in our best practices, you don't need to make any changes. Also, the new warning in Chrome doesn’t impact your website’s ranking in Google Search.

If you have any questions, please come and have a chat with us in the Webmaster Help Forum.


Posted by Emily Schechter‎, Chrome Security, Giacomo Gnecchi Ruscone & Badr Salmi El Idrissi, Trust & Safety

How we fought webspam – Webspam Report 2017





We always want to make sure that when you use Google Search to find information, you get the highest quality results. But, we are aware of many bad actors who are trying to manipulate search ranking and profit from it, which is at odds with our core mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Over the years, we've devoted a huge effort toward combating abuse and spam on Search. Here's a look at how we fought abuse in 2017.


We call these various types of abuse that violate the webmaster guidelines “spam.” Our evaluation indicated that for many years, less than 1 percent of search results users visited are spammy. In the last couple of years, we’ve managed to further reduce this by half.



Google webspam trends and how we fought webspam in 2017



As we continued to improve, spammers also evolved. One of the trends in 2017 was an increase in website hacking—both for spamming search ranking and for spreading malware. Hacked websites are serious threats to users because hackers can take complete control of a site, deface homepages, erase relevant content, or insert malware and harmful code. They may also record keystrokes, stealing login credentials for online banking or financial transactions. In 2017 we focused on reducing this threat, and were able to detect and remove from search results more than 80 percent of these sites. But hacking is not just a spam problem for search users—it affects the owners of websites as well. To help website owners keep their websites safe, we created a hands-on resource to help webmasters strengthen their websites’ security and revamped our help resources to help webmasters recover from a hacked website. The guides are available in 19 languages.

We’re also recognizing the importance of robust content management systems (CMSs). A large percentage of websites are run on one of several popular CMSs, and subsequently spammers exploited them by finding ways to abuse their provisions for user-generated content, such as posting spam content in comment sections or forums. We’re working closely with many of the providers of popular content management systems like WordPress and Joomla to help them also fight spammers that abuse their forums, comment sections and websites.


Another abuse vector is the manipulation of links, which is one of the foundation ranking signals for Search. In 2017 we doubled down our effort in removing unnatural links via ranking improvements and scalable manual actions. We have observed a year-over-year reduction of spam links by almost half.


Working with users and webmasters for a better web



We’re here to listen: Our automated systems are constantly working to detect and block spam. Still, we always welcome hearing from you when something seems … phishy. Last year, we were able to take action on nearly 90,000 user reports of search spam.


Reporting spam, malware and other issues you find helps us protect the site owner and other searchers from this abuse. You can file a spam report, a phishing report or a malware report. We very much appreciate these reports—a big THANK YOU to all of you who submitted them.


We also actively work with webmasters to maintain the health of the web ecosystem. Last year, we sent 45 million messages to registered website owners via Search Console letting them know about issues we identified with their websites. More than 6 million of these messages are related to manual actions, providing transparency to webmasters so they understand why their sites got manual actions and how to resolve the issue.

Last year, we released a beta version of a new Search Console to a limited number of users and afterwards, to all users of Search Console. We listened to what matters most to the users, and started with popular functionalities such as Search performance, Index Coverage and others. These can help webmasters optimize their websites' Google Search presence more easily.

Through enhanced Safe Browsing protections, we continue to protect more users from bad actors online. In the last year, we have made significant improvements to our safe browsing protection, such as broadening our protection of macOS devices, enabling predictive phishing protection in Chrome, cracked down on mobile unwanted software, and launched significant improvements to our ability to protect users from deceptive Chrome extension installation.


We have a multitude of channels to engage directly with webmasters. We have dedicated team members who meet with webmasters regularly both online and in-person. We conducted more than 250 online office hours, online events and offline events around the world in more than 60 cities to audiences totaling over 220,000 website owners, webmasters and digital marketers. In addition, our official support forum has answered a high volume of questions in many languages. Last year, the forum had 63,000 threads generating over 280,000 contributing posts by 100+ Top Contributors globally. For more details, see this post. Apart from the forums, blogs and the SEO starter guide, the Google Webmaster YouTube channel is another channel to find more tips and insights. We launched a new SEO snippets video series to help with short and to-the-point answers to specific questions. Be sure to subscribe to the channel!


Despite all these improvements, we know we’re not yet done. We’re relentless in our pursue of an abuse-free user experience, and will keep improving our collaboration with the ecosystem to make it happen.



Posted by Cody Kwok, Principal Engineer

How we fought webspam – Webspam Report 2017





We always want to make sure that when you use Google Search to find information, you get the highest quality results. But, we are aware of many bad actors who are trying to manipulate search ranking and profit from it, which is at odds with our core mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Over the years, we've devoted a huge effort toward combating abuse and spam on Search. Here's a look at how we fought abuse in 2017.


We call these various types of abuse that violate the webmaster guidelines “spam.” Our evaluation indicated that for many years, less than 1 percent of search results users visited are spammy. In the last couple of years, we’ve managed to further reduce this by half.



Google webspam trends and how we fought webspam in 2017



As we continued to improve, spammers also evolved. One of the trends in 2017 was an increase in website hacking—both for spamming search ranking and for spreading malware. Hacked websites are serious threats to users because hackers can take complete control of a site, deface homepages, erase relevant content, or insert malware and harmful code. They may also record keystrokes, stealing login credentials for online banking or financial transactions. In 2017 we focused on reducing this threat, and were able to detect and remove from search results more than 80 percent of these sites. But hacking is not just a spam problem for search users—it affects the owners of websites as well. To help website owners keep their websites safe, we created a hands-on resource to help webmasters strengthen their websites’ security and revamped our help resources to help webmasters recover from a hacked website. The guides are available in 19 languages.

We’re also recognizing the importance of robust content management systems (CMSs). A large percentage of websites are run on one of several popular CMSs, and subsequently spammers exploited them by finding ways to abuse their provisions for user-generated content, such as posting spam content in comment sections or forums. We’re working closely with many of the providers of popular content management systems like WordPress and Joomla to help them also fight spammers that abuse their forums, comment sections and websites.


Another abuse vector is the manipulation of links, which is one of the foundation ranking signals for Search. In 2017 we doubled down our effort in removing unnatural links via ranking improvements and scalable manual actions. We have observed a year-over-year reduction of spam links by almost half.


Working with users and webmasters for a better web



We’re here to listen: Our automated systems are constantly working to detect and block spam. Still, we always welcome hearing from you when something seems … phishy. Last year, we were able to take action on nearly 90,000 user reports of search spam.


Reporting spam, malware and other issues you find helps us protect the site owner and other searchers from this abuse. You can file a spam report, a phishing report or a malware report. We very much appreciate these reports—a big THANK YOU to all of you who submitted them.


We also actively work with webmasters to maintain the health of the web ecosystem. Last year, we sent 45 million messages to registered website owners via Search Console letting them know about issues we identified with their websites. More than 6 million of these messages are related to manual actions, providing transparency to webmasters so they understand why their sites got manual actions and how to resolve the issue.

Last year, we released a beta version of a new Search Console to a limited number of users and afterwards, to all users of Search Console. We listened to what matters most to the users, and started with popular functionalities such as Search performance, Index Coverage and others. These can help webmasters optimize their websites' Google Search presence more easily.

Through enhanced Safe Browsing protections, we continue to protect more users from bad actors online. In the last year, we have made significant improvements to our safe browsing protection, such as broadening our protection of macOS devices, enabling predictive phishing protection in Chrome, cracked down on mobile unwanted software, and launched significant improvements to our ability to protect users from deceptive Chrome extension installation.


We have a multitude of channels to engage directly with webmasters. We have dedicated team members who meet with webmasters regularly both online and in-person. We conducted more than 250 online office hours, online events and offline events around the world in more than 60 cities to audiences totaling over 220,000 website owners, webmasters and digital marketers. In addition, our official support forum has answered a high volume of questions in many languages. Last year, the forum had 63,000 threads generating over 280,000 contributing posts by 100+ Top Contributors globally. For more details, see this post. Apart from the forums, blogs and the SEO starter guide, the Google Webmaster YouTube channel is another channel to find more tips and insights. We launched a new SEO snippets video series to help with short and to-the-point answers to specific questions. Be sure to subscribe to the channel!


Despite all these improvements, we know we’re not yet done. We’re relentless in our pursue of an abuse-free user experience, and will keep improving our collaboration with the ecosystem to make it happen.



Posted by Cody Kwok, Principal Engineer

Our goal: helping webmasters and content creators

Great websites are the result of the hard work of website owners who make their content and services accessible to the world. Even though it’s simpler now to run a website than it was years ago, it can still feel like a complex undertaking. This is why we invest a lot of time and effort in improving Google Search so that website owners can spend more time focusing on building the most useful content for their users, while we take care of helping users find that content. 

Most website owners find they don’t have to worry much about what Google is doing—they post their content, and then Googlebot discovers, crawls, indexes and understands that content, to point users to relevant pages on those sites. However, sometimes the technical details still matter, and sometimes a great deal.

For those times when site owners would like a bit of help from someone at Google, or an explanation for why something works a particular way, or why things appear in a particular way, or how to fix what looks like a technical glitch, we have a global team dedicated to making sure there are many places for a website owner to get help from Google and knowledgeable members of the community.

The first place to start for help is Google Webmasters, a place where all of our support resources (many of which are available in 40 languages) are within easy reach:

Our second path to getting help is through our Google Webmaster Central Help Forums. We have forums in 16 languages—in English, Spanish, Hindi, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, German, Russian, Turkish, Polish, Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese and Korean. The forums are staffed with dedicated Googlers who are there to make sure your questions get answered. Aside from the Googlers who monitor the forums, there is an amazing group of Product Experts who generously offer their time to help other members of the community—many times providing greater detail and analysis for a particular website’s content than we could. The forums allow for both a public discussion and, if the case requires it, for private follow-up replies in the forum.

A third path for support to website owners is our series of Online Webmaster Office Hours — in English, German, Japanese, Turkish, Hindi and French. Anyone who joins these is welcome to ask us questions about website appearance in Google Search, which we will answer to the best of our abilities. All of our team members think that one of the best parts of speaking at conferences and events is the opportunity to answer questions from the audience,  and the online office hours format creates that opportunity for many more people who might not be able to travel to a specialized event. You can always check out the Google Webmaster calendar for upcoming webmaster officer hours and live events.

While how a website behaves on the web is openly visible to all who can see it, we know that some website owners prefer not to make it known their website has a problem in a public forum. There’s no shame in asking for support, but if you have an issue for your website that seems sensitive—for which you don’t think you can share all the details publicly—you can call out that you would prefer to share necessary details only with someone experienced and who is willing to help, using the forum’s “Private Reply” feature.

Are there other things you think we should be doing that would help your website get the most out of search? Please let us know -- in our forums, our office hours, or via Twitter @googlewmc.

Posted by Juan Felipe Rincón from Google’s Webmaster Outreach & Support team