Google admitted today that search spam has increased in recent months, and the search giant has outlined its plan to combat spam and the rise of “content farms.”
Google search quality and SEO czar Matt Cutts published a detailed piece on the Google Blog regarding the company’s efforts to improve the quality of its search results. He starts off admitting what we’ve been suspecting for months: there are more spammers trying to scam unsuspecting Googlers.

“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,” Cutts said. “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.”
Cutts makes it clear that webspam refers to the junk that appears in search results when websites try to cheat their way to a higher position. With the launch of the new version of its search engine, Google Caffeine, Google has been indexing more content than before, including spam.
“As we’ve increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well,” Cutts explained. “To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly.”
Google’s new classifier is designed to detect spam on individual web pages by identifying spammy words and phrases. Cutts says that the company has also improved its ability to detect hacked sites and is testing new changes, including one that penalizes websites for copying the content of others without having original content of its own.
At the same time, Google is adding a new measure to combat “content farms.” These controversial organizations, Demand Media being the best known, utilize cheap, contracted labor to write articles of questionable quality. Cutts says that Google has implemented two algorithmic changes to stop these low-quality sites from rising to the top.
Today’s news can’t be good for the spammers, but it could be especially painful for Demand Media, whose IPO is just around the corner. Google isn’t going to let anything stand between it and search quality, even if that means taking down thousands of spammers and content farms in the process.