On the latest Search Off The Record podcast, John Mueller, Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt had a special guest from the Google Search Quality team named Duy Nguyen. He said that Google has built a “very effective and comprehensive machine-learning model that basically took care of most of the obvious spam.”

He said that this machine learning model deals with most of the spam that let’s his team spend more of their time to “focus on more important work.” He added that the spam machine learning model “basically took over all the heavy lifting” to tackle this most obvious spam.

At about 3:45 minutes here is what Duy Nguyen said:

Here is the audio:

I wonder how the two spam updates from last week are related to this – was it updating the machine learning model or something new?

More Spam Topics

Later on in the podcast, Duy Nguyen said that hacked spam is still a problem for the ecosystem, and many sites are using outdated platforms and are easy targets. The hack spam they see today is not really much hacking, it is more just easy loopholes. You can sign up for Google Search Console to help you if you are worried about hack spam issues, Google will notify you when it is detected.

Duy Nguyen said one of the things that keep him up at night are the online scams, like Gmail customer support spam. Google is working hard on this but education for consumers is important.

They then talked about how you shouldn’t copy spammers just because they may be ranking well, the spam is likely not the reason. Plus Duy Nguyen said that he hates to see webmasters focusing on external metrics (he didn’t mention it but I suspect DA) and focus on improving that versus spending the time thinking about the overall site. Don’t focus on one thing, one factor, do not focus on external signals.

Forum discussion at Twitter.