WHAT IS GOOGLE DOING TO PREVENT SPAM?

From the Interview of Sven Naumann, Uli Lutz and Johannes Mehlem from the German Search Quality Team at Google in Dublin. They support website operators from there and work towards improving search results – by fighting against web spam, among other things.

Our test shows that Google also displays sites that spread spam and even malware. Are spammers better at the art of search engine optimisation than the operators of genuine websites? 

It is true that people who circulate malware often try quite aggressively to achieve high rankings in the search results of search engines. Even if such a website escapes us every once in a while, we can assure you that we take great care to ensure that our users are protected from spam and malware. Since 2006, Google scans for malware and marks them as such. This way, we keep several hundred million users per week from inadvertently visiting sites that spread malware. We publish details about that on our Online Security News Blog and in a transparency report with many interesting statistics (can be found on google.com/insidesearch, d. Red.).

Last year, Google made two huge changes to the search algorithm with its updates Penguin and Panda. How do these updates help in the fight against spam in search results? 

Panda and Penguin are two updates that significantly improve the search results by reducing the visibility of low-quality sites and spam. Although these updates attracted a great deal of attention, we carry out about 500 changes in our search engine algorithms every year. We constantly work at improving search results and at fighting web spam.

What is Google doing to keep the search results free of spam? 

In addition to the constant improvements through algorithm updates, we rely on an international team, which traces new trends and spam technologies. We also support webmasters in the creation of search engine friendly websites and in taking preventive measures against hack attacks. For example, we have a full-fledged Help Centre and a blog, forum and Webmaster tools, which you can find at google.com/webmasters.

Cyber criminals are increasingly hacking genuine sites to spread malware through them. How are you tackling this problem? 

We endeavour to improve our algorithms for the detection of hacked contents. This is not an easy task, because hackers and spammers mostly have excellent technical know-how. They often have no qualms in breaking laws and are very active in disguising their tracks. Lastly, it is the task of every webmaster to keep its own server and his own website safe and to minimize the risks of a hack attack. Since this is not so easy, we offer detailed help articles and other features in our webmaster tools. We also collaborate with initiatives such as stopbadware.org and provide our Safe Browsing API, which often helps to keep users from visiting potentially dangerous websites.

How do these mechanisms help users of Google search to surf safely? 

To protect our users better, we have introduced corresponding warning hints into the results pages. Moreover, many browsers warn users when they click on some result. This is where the data from stopbadware.org is used. Currently, we show 40 million warnings very week in the search results and 200 million browser warnings.