Google sent 4.3 million messages to webmasters and saw 33% increase in clean-up efforts

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% 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 over 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% increase in the number of sites that went through the reconsideration process, so about 1.4 million sites of the 4.3 specifically submitted reconsideration requests.

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

You can read the full report over here.

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