The Google folks are taking issue over spam and the quality of Google searches which some have claimed has gone down in recent months.
Today on its official blogsite, the company's Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer stated: "January brought a spate of stories about Google's search quality. Reading through some of these recent articles, you might ask whether our search quality has gotten worse. The short answer is that according to the evaluation metrics that we've 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."
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He went on to state Google has taken recent actions to help clean up the spam issue:
First he stated that Google has launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. "The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words-the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments."
Second: "We've also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010. And we're evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others' content and sites with low levels of original content. We'll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites."
He went on to try to dispel what he called a misconception that Google doesn't take as strong action on spammy content in our index if those sites are serving Google ads. He stated:
- Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google;
- Displaying Google ads does not help a site's rankings in Google; and
- Buying Google ads does not increase a site's rankings in Google's search results.
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