The team at Google revealed in their recent webspam report the actions taken to deal with link spam throughout the year of 2018. Being only one of three spam types discussed within the article that was released, user-generated spam and spam on hacked sites are also points of discussion.
The term ‘link spam’ can be defined as the out-of-context posting of links to sites such as discussion forums and blog comments, and refers to any and all link building practices that are found to violate Google’s webmaster guidelines; the value of links as a factor for search ranking something stressed by the team to be of great importance. So, how is it that Google fought link spam last year, and what impact will this have upon the rankings system?
Put simply, the team at Google worked over the last year to ensure that various bad linking practices were made to be less effective, aiming to decrease the volume of users building links solely as an attempt to rank better in the various search results.
This saw an 80% reduction on the impact had by user-generated spam on search users, and action taken on 64% of the 18,000 search spam user reports that were processed during 2018. These steps aim to improve the quality of organic search results shown to users of the Google platform.
To conclude, the steps taken by Google aim to reduce the impact link building practises have upon the ranking of search results, promoting the use of more honest SEO techniques. To find out more about these techniques, visit our dedicated SEO page and discover how our digital marketing agency can help you to increase your overall ranking and reach the top of the organic search results.