Google has confirmed that the rollout of its October 2023 Spam Update has finished as of October 20. The spam-fighting update was first announced on October 4. In its announcement, Google says the latest spam update was initiated based on user feedback. Many people reported increased spam results when searching in their native languages. With … Read more
You’re looking to reach the inbox — fantastic. You put time into crafting the perfect marketing email and so you want it to reach your recipients and receive positive engagement — even better. As a last check before hitting send, you have found this blog post to confirm that you’re not using any spam trigger … Read more
Google has announced a new update to its search algorithm to reduce spam results for users worldwide. The October 2023 Spam Update targets cloaking, hacked, auto-generated, and scraped spam content in multiple languages, including Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese, and others. According to Google, the update was prompted by feedback from its community members who … Read more
“I did what people normally would do — Googled ‘locksmiths near me.’” These telltale words preface a scandalous account of listing spam I recently ran into on an Irish call-in radio show on RTÉ. I’m going to share a summary of it in today’s column, offer my best understanding of the root of the problem, … Read more
Google advises against cheap TLDs due to spam risks, says TLD keywords don’t improve SEO. In a recent podcast, Google’s Search Relations Team discussed how website owners should approach choosing a top-level domain (TLD). The discussion weighed the dilemmas of expensive .com domains versus affordable alternatives like .xyz, emphasizing the need to balance cost, credibility, … Read more
An ongoing issue with Google’s Gmail is disrupting the normal functioning of email newsletter services. The issue is causing many emails to be redirected to subscribers’ spam folders instead of their primary inboxes. This problem came to light at Search Engine Journal in early June when our email newsletter open rates nosedived from our usual … Read more
In a Google SEO office hours session, Google’s Duy Nguyen of the search quality team answered a question about links on spam sites and how trust has something to do with it. It was interesting how the Googler said they were protecting the anchor text signal. It’s not something that’s commonly discussed. Building trust with … Read more
We all get spam calls from time to time, and it can be tempting just to ignore them. However, according to a recent study, spam calls are becoming more and more common, and they’re not just a nuisance. They can also be a serious security risk. According to Purdue University, nearly 4.5 billion spam calls … Read more
Remember the good old days when SEO professionals tried to bamboozle search engines with the “keywords” metatag? It might be happening again through schema stuffing. This time, though, it could do more harm. The other day, a customer was having some problems getting their schema on their web page. I looked at what he had … Read more
Google has published its annual report on search spam revealing SpamBrain, a machine learning-based spam identification system, took action on six times as many spam sites in 2021 as it did in 2020. By identifying these sites, Google claims a 70% reduction in hacked spam and a 75% reduction in gibberish spam on hosted platforms. … Read more
Every website on the Internet, no matter how small or large, is under some form of attack by a user-generated content spammer or a spambot. Increasingly, many of the attacks are focused on hiding links because links are a high-value commodity, fetching hundreds of dollars each. The following solutions will help stop these attacks and … Read more
