With June about to end, we have yet another update in the vast spanning world of SEO. The giant platform for search engine result- Google rollout their new spam algorithm on 23rd June. Google’s Danny Sullivan confirmed this latest algorithm update which is aimed at fighting spam in search results. A second update is about to follow soon this week.
Though Google didn’t provide the exact details about this particular update, the company regularly rolls out spam updates in order to maintain the quality of its search results. Perhaps, the recent malicious incidents also contributed to prompting the update for the spam algorithm.
According to Google, spam indicates the low-quality sites that are involved in tricking users to provide personal information or installing malware. Recently, there had been staggering cases of fraudulent and malware attacks distributed through Google search result page.
The new spam update will also target irksome phishing scams and other bad actors on the web that try to rank in search results by posing as highly relevant pages.
Considering all the facts, even the sites following Google’s guidelines could be vulnerable to hacked spam. The sites not adequately secured and leaving room for attacks could be unknowingly serving spam to its users using search results. An annual spam-fighting report from Google indicates that hacked spam is not contained to a few geographical locations, it has instead widespread across the world.
Hence, keep an eye on your rankings in the coming weeks. Following the June spam update, if you suddenly get to see a drop in rankings across your website, you should examine the security of your site and watch out for signs of a possible attack.
When the spam update hit a website, its content is either moved down in search results or delisted from Google’s index. The company estimates that its automated systems keep more than 99% of visits from search results, free from spam.
While making the announcement about the algorithm update, Sullivan referred to a blog post from April which details the results of Google’s recent spam-fighting efforts.
“With major events last year, including a global pandemic, we have devoted significant effort in extending protection to the billions of searches we received on such important topics,” the company noted in its April’s blog post. “Every day, we’re discovering, crawling, and indexing billions of web pages. Among those pages is a lot of spam — every day, we discover 40 billion spammy pages.”
Google’s Defend System Against Spam
Google has its own spam-fighting AI, incredibly effective at catching both known and new spam trends. It detects spam while crawling the pages or other content. Content detected as spam is not added to the index. It works the same way for content discovered through sitemaps and Search Console.
In the next step, Google’s AI aided automated system analyzes the content included in the index. When a user searches for a specific keyword, the spam-fighting system double-checks the matched content to ensure it is spam-free. If spam appears in the content, it won’t display in the top search results.
This way, Google prevents spam to make it to the top results in the search engine results page.
Google had indicated further advancements in this automated spam-fighting system in its April’s blog post. “In spite of the significant advancements we made in our spam-fighting efforts, spammers are highly motivated to develop new techniques that can evade our detection. We’re always working to get better and protect people from new types of abuse, and external reports can help.”
Well, learning more about the impact of the June 2021 spam updates is likely to be possible after Google will publish its annual spam-fighting report next year. Meanwhile, make sure your site is playing by Google’s rules and guidelines, so the ranking remains stable in the search results.