The announcement was made on Twitter with a short statement, ‘As part of our regular work to improve results, we’ve released a spam update to our systems. You can learn more about our efforts to fight spam in this post: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/04/how-we-fought-search-spam-2020’

Whilst some sites may seem some ranking fluctuations this update should only target sites that are pushing the boundaries when it comes to spam, the large majority of well set up and business-facing websites should not see any negative impacts. If you have seen any negative impacts in your organic performance recently then get in touch with our SEO experts.

The rapid advances in AI have given Google an additional weapon in its arsenal of fighting spam. In recent years the introduction of spam specific AI improvements has led to an 80% reduction in auto-generated and scraped content websites.

Despite Googles advances against spam, these types of sites do still create revenue for owners and they will therefore try and find routes to continue to run these sites.

To put the problem into context, every day Google discovers 40 billion spam pages. That is an awful lot of spam to be discovered and blocked to ensure legitimate and knowledgeable websites are getting the rankings they deserve.

Generally, a large amount of spam is automatically removed from the search results by AI algorithms. When a spammy site or page does slip through the system there are some failsafe’s which can manually remove spammy results.

The bottom line is, whilst people are making money from this practice, they will continue to try and find ways to get their spam content past Google. This means Google will always be chasing and trying to close loopholes around spam. They are clearly taking it seriously and updates like these will continue to battle against spam and should keep users experiences on Google platforms spam-free.