Google’s next algorithm change will target ‘hacked spam’, the company announced recently on its blog. The company is going to be “aggressively targeting hacked spam” in a bid to “protect users and webmasters”. “Hacked spam” is when a website has been hacked and content is added by a hacker. This can include advertising “counterfeit goods or illegal pharmaceutical drugs” and the spam might also lead to low quality sites and sites that contain pornography. Google suggests that changes might impact “roughly 5% of queries” and this could mean a significant drop on the number of listings for certain search terms – in some cases the number might go lower than 10 listings.
“Website owners that don’t implement standard best practices for security can leave their websites vulnerable to being easily hacked,” suggested Ning Song, the Google engineer who blogged the news. “This can include government sites, universities, small business, company websites, restaurants, hobby organizations, conferences, etc. Spammers and cyber-criminals purposely seek out those sites and inject pages with malicious content in an attempt to gain rank and traffic in search engines.”
“We are aggressively targeting hacked spam in order to protect users and webmasters”, she added.
Research suggests that hundreds of thousands of hacked spam pages (particularly PDF documents) are currently accessible on the Internet. With Google’s focus on a quality search experience, such pages have represented a major problem. People who experience hacked spam issues on their sites should visit Google’s
help center. In addition, webmasters and site owners should keep uptodate by visiting Google’s Webmaster Help Forums.
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