Changes in how Google handles search rankings are designed to boost content from real people, not from content farms that optimize content for search engines, and that’s working alongside other efforts, such as improving results for product review pages, Sullivan says.
Not that there’s anything wrong with SEO, the practice of optimizing web pages so they rank higher in search engines. “It helps us find and understand relevant content,” says Sullivan, “SEO isn’t a special method of appearing in the top results. The main thing is what our advice to everyone has been for a long time: create useful content for people, not search engines .
How big of a problem is spam?
It’s a problem of about 40 billion a day. That’s the number of pages with spam and malicious content that Google Search discovers every day. Sullivan says Google’s ongoing efforts filter out about 99 percent, but the volume of malicious and spammy content continues to grow.
Google is using an AI-based spam prevention system called SpamBrain, which Sullivan said led to six times more spam sites being identified in 2021 than in the previous year.
Should I be concerned about malware in Google Ads and results?
This year has seen several high-profile incidents of malware sneaking into search engine ads, including a recent one involving an ad for Gimp.org. Google’s failure to curtail some types of deceptive ads, including some for anti-abortion information centers and ads for fraudulent services supposedly run by the government, has drawn criticism.
As with spam content and search, Google Ads is in a constant battle to remove malware content and bad players. Google Ads contact Ginny Marvin says Google Ads addresses this by “verifying advertiser identities and identifying coordinated activity between accounts using signals across our network.” She says their efforts include both automated systems and human reviewers to try to monitor for abuse in more than 180 countries. It’s a big task. “To give an idea of the scale of our enforcement efforts in 2021, we have removed more than 3.4 billion ads, restricted more than 5.7 billion ads and suspended more than 5.6 billion advertiser accounts,” she says.
But it’s not perfect. Marvin says it helps to understand where and when ads actually show up in search results. Users who think they’re clicking on something suspicious can first click the three dots next to the ad and select “About this ad,” which contains information about the advertiser and why they saw the ad. Advertiser pages show the other ads an advertiser has served in the last 30 days. If it’s something malicious, users can report the ad in question. And Google’s recently launched My Ads Center gives users more control over what types of ads they see. You can block sensitive ads and personalize the types of ads that appear.
Some proponents say that’s not good enough. Katie Paul, the director of the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project, says Google has been warned about these problems for years and has not taken widespread action to stamp out malware and misinformation. “We’ve repeatedly pointed out that there is malicious content or flaws in the material showing up in Google’s search ads, and everyone seems to get the same answer over and over without Google actually addressing the issue,” says Paul.
Are Google Shopping sellers legit?
If you’re already working through your holiday shopping list, you may have occasionally seen deals in Google Shopping results that seem too good to be true. Shopping for a specific high-demand video card, for example, may yield a bunch of results that are price-matched, and one or two from a website you’ve never heard of where the price is marked down so much that it seems suspicious.
That’s a challenge for Google, says Matt Madrigal, vice president of Merchant Shopping. “We’re always adapting to keep bad sellers of listings off our platforms, and it’s an area we’re focusing heavily on as we scale the number of sellers and products on Google,” he says. “There is no end point in the fight against fraud.”
Madrigal says merchants are subject to policies that specifically prohibit misrepresentation and counterfeit goods, among other things. As with Search and Ads, automation and human review are involved in vetting these vendors. But Madrigal says Google Shopping also relies on user feedback to identify suspected fraudulent sellers. Google doesn’t have a direct way to report merchants on its product carousel pages, but it has a general Shopping support page with a virtual agent where users can report bad players.
As with Google Ads, Paul says this trend of asking users to oversee the system is troubling when the company has the resources to hire more content moderators and experts. “We’re seeing the same cookie-cutter response from Google,” says Paul. “Like Facebook, we see companies say, ‘Report this information when you see it,’ but at the same time, this billion-dollar company puts the responsibility back on users to clean up their own search platform, their primary profit mechanism.”
