Google Web Spam Report 2021: Welcome SpamBrain

Google’s annual report shows achievements in keeping spam and malicious content away from Search.

Google shared this news on 23rd April 2021 and has given its machine learning-based spam detection systems a new name SpamBrain.

SpamBrain is a new name but the technology, the AI, is from 2018, so SpamBrain is technically not new.

The SpamBrain was first launched in 2018 and has been continuously enhancing its effectiveness since then.

It has found roughly six times as many spam sites in 2021 as it did in 2020.

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Google's Official Announcement on SpamBrain

It’s definitely not magic that helps keep more than 99% of visits from Search spam-free! 🧙 Find out what happens behind the scenes and how we fought Search spam in 2021 🔎✨→ https://t.co/IuJjxGkQBD pic.twitter.com/5yn3eFAN0C
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) April 21, 2022

What Google's Spam Brain Did In 2021?

In 2021, Google claims it made even more progress in recognizing and repelling search spam attempts.

The following are some of the highlights:

6 times more identification of spam sites
70% reduction in hacked spam sites
75% reduction in gibberish spam on hosted platforms
99% “spam free” searches

Overall, Google’s spambrain really performed well in 2021 fighting against spam and malicious sites.

Google Committed to Search Quality and User Safety

Google claims to have made substantial progress in fighting against link spam, frauds, and online abuse with the goal of increasing search quality and protecting user safety in 2021 with the help of spambrain.

They launched a link spam update to broadly identify unnatural links in multiple languages and prevent them from affecting search quality.

Fighting Ranking Manipulation

Apart from fighting with spam, they have work hard to eliminate low-quality material and ranking manipulations by fighting activities that narrowly avoid their quality criteria but are actually manipulative and damaging the user experience.

In 2021 Google launched two new major updates to how it evaluates product reviews.

These updates helped in significant reduction in low quality reviews, while promoting ones with better content and expertise.