Google Revising Search Algorithms to Deal with "Spam"

The problem with much "search engine optimization" is that it essentially consists of mechanical "tricks." SEO professionals will argue, rightly, that SEO is not necessarily limited to such techniques, but I suspect most people are familiar with some of the "dumber" techniques.

Google, for example, has recently been accused of allowing too much trickery to seep into search results, and Google seems to be working on making that sort of thing harder. Google itself says that, according to the evaluation metrics it has 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," Google says.

None of that will stop some people, and some sites, from continuing to boost rankings in ways that some might view as the equivalent of "spamming." That's one reason why it is a good thing that Google constantly revises its algorithms.

Official Google Blog: Google search and search engine spam