Today SEO czar Matt Cutts published a detailed article on the Google Blog regarding the company’s efforts to improve the quality of Google search results. Matt is admitting what Google has been suspecting for months: there are more spammers trying to scam unsuspecting Googlers.

This year there were lots of stories about Google’s bad search quality. Reading through some of these recent articles, one might ask whether Google search quality has gotten worse. However Matt says that "The short answer is that according to the evaluation metrics that we’ve refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness. Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago, and spam in most other languages is even lower than in English. However, we have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months, and while we’ve already made progress, we have new efforts underway to continue to improve our search quality."

Matt article articulate that:
“Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago, and spam in most other languages is even lower than in English,” Matt said. “However, we have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months, and while we’ve already made progress, we have new efforts underway to continue to improve our search quality.”

“As we’ve increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well, To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spam on-page content to rank highly.”

It seems that what Google has done is to redesign the document-level classifier that makes it harder for spam on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spam words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments and so on. They have also radically improved the ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010. And they’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. Google is planning to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about Spam and low-quality sites.

Google in In 2010, launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites and content farms that consist primarily of spam or low-quality content. Google continues to have hard time to keep up with sophistications of spammers approach. Google acknowledges the fact is that they’re not perfect, and combined with users’ skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception.

In this blog, Matt states one misconception that he has observed in the last couple of months:

"One misconception that we’ve seen in the last few weeks is the idea that Google doesn’t take as strong action on spam content in our index if those sites are serving Google ads. To be crystal clear:

Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google;
Displaying Google ads does not help a site’s rankings in Google; and
Buying Google ads does not increase a site’s rankings in Google’s search results.

These principles have always applied, but it’s important to affirm they still hold true."

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@ Friday, February 25, 2011 9:31 AM

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