Google has published its annual webspam report and it is just more of the same. In short, there is more spam, Google is getting better at detecting and thus blocking that spam and of course a bit on the COVID stuff. Here are some bulleted highlights from this webspam report.

Just a reminder, Google said last year the search experience was 99% spam free. Google said the same thing this year:

Okay, the highlights:

Google discovers 40 billion spammy pages every single day – an increase of 60% from last year
Reduced sites with auto-generated and scraped content by more than 80% compared to a couple of years ago
Reduced hacked spam detection capability by more than 50%
COVID and pandemic stuff, Google said it “devoted significant effort in extending protection to the billions of searches we received on such important topics.”
Google estimated that these automated systems help keep more than 99% of visits from Search completely spam-free
Google said it also “made significant progress in improving our coverage and protecting more users against online scams and fraud.”

Google shared this descriptive graphic that shows Googlebot beating up on spam:

Google creates AI, artificial intelligence with many these improvements.

Forum discussion at Twitter & WebmasterWorld.