Google Says War on Spam Ranks First

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Google principal engineer Matt Cutts response to recent complaints from users about the increasing prevalence of spam in search results.

The war on webspam, Cutts writes, is being waged as intensely as ever, in fact saying that Google’s search quality is presently “better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness.”

The post goes on to say, however, that while “pure webspam” has decreased in recent years, users’ expectations of Google search results have increased. “People are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content,” he writes.

Content farms pose a relatively new kind of problem, says Cutts, because they can clutter search results with a shallow brand of content without falling into the category of traditional spam of years past.

Nevertheless, Google is as committed to the fight as ever and is “evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower,” Cutts wrote.

To add some clarification, he reminded users of the following principles of Google search results:

•    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
•    Buying Google ads does not increase a site’s rankings in Google’s search results.

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