Google recently rolled out a new set of algorithms designed to help clean out their search results from spam induced via hacked websites. As a webmaster, if you didn’t notice the hack yourself than Google’s Webmaster Tools will often times send you a notification when it locates something suspicious – and often times these are pages with paragraphs worth of barely legible sentences consisting primarily of spammy keywords and links. Unfortunately these hacked pages sometimes don’t get detected by anyone, Google indexes them, and then searchers are stuck looking at half a page worth of places to buy prescription drugs online instead of finding the side effects to their prescription like they wanted to.
Recently we have started rolling out a series of algorithmic changes that aim to tackle hacked spam in our search results. A huge amount of legitimate sites are hacked by spammers and used to engage in abusive behavior, such as malware download, promotion of traffic to low quality sites, porn, and marketing of counterfeit goods or illegal pharmaceutical drugs, etc.
Google has stated that the new algorithm should effect about 5% of queries, which was later clarified even further by Gary Illyes from Google when he stated that the new algorithm will only effect websites that are hacked and that are showing up for spam-like search queries.
@rustybrick yesr. That's what we're aiming for.
— Gary Illyes (@methode) October 9, 2015
An interesting thing to note here is that Google has opted to reduce the amount of search results shown for those spam-like queries – which in-turn should show only the most relevant results now – without all those places to buy fake drugs online that is. Here’s to hoping to the new algorithm doesn’t go horribly wrong and start removing organic and legitimate search results from Google’s index.
