How is the Google Spam Crackdown Treating You?

What Does Google See as Spam?

Google’s definition of spam doesn’t just include sites that lead you to malware, or try to scam you into giving personal information. Their quality standard aims to eliminate poor content sites, or sites that send users to another website than what they had intended to click on. Hidden links, manipulative language, hidden texts and too many ads will all raise flags for the Google “SpamBrain”. The algorithm works by comparing your site to other spam sites, and has “learning” capabilities to observe and record the patterns of your sites and other pages that behave as spam.

What Can We Do?

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to continuously adjust your website and business profiles to adhere to Google’s standards and guidelines. Google rewards high quality- the better the content on your site, the lower the chance is of it being detected as spam. Edit your pages for too many ads, manipulative language, insecure links and low quality content. Study the “Google Search Essentials” guidelines, which has been rewritten to be more user friendly. The Search Essentials guideline is broken up into three segments, one of which is about their Spam Policies. These tools can help businesses make sure they are up to date with the technical requirements, learn what Google defines as spam, and how to create helpful content that Google can easily find. If you are unlucky enough to have manual action taken against your page, don’t panic! Report the mistake to Google, and reach out to an SEO expert if you’re unsure about your business page following spam guidelines!