Google has just published its 2021 Webspam Report, which describes how it "fought Search spam."

It's using an AI-based anti-spam tool called SpamBrain, which it started using in 2018, and since 2020 has picked up more than six times the spam sites, with hacked spam down 70%, and "gibberish spam on hosting platforms down 75%. It claims this has resulted in keeping 99% of search spam-free.

Google has also worked on reducing the effects of "low quality content ranking and manipulations by fighting behaviours that attempt to narrowly avoid violating" its quality guidelines, but are manipulative in a way to "degrade the user experience."

It went on to say it was making significant progress in "fighting link spam scams, and online harassment." This work resulted in a 40% reduction of "scammy results."

Links still help us discover and rank results in meaningful ways, and we made a lot of progress in 2021 to protect this core signal. We launched a link spam update to broadly identify unnatural links and prevent them from affecting search quality.

Read the full report [developers.google.com...]