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by Matt_Cutts
5722 days ago
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That was probably me. We have two sides to the webspam team at Google: engineering and manual. We definitely prefer to write algorithms so that we avoid dealing with individual websites--the idea is that you strive to fix the root cause of an issue, not to tackle specific sites. However, if we see a website that violates our guidelines and that gets past the algorithms, we are willing to take manual action. Where possible, we use the output of the manual team not only to reduce spam itself, but to train the next iteration of algorithms. For example, one of the big issues in blackhat spam this past year was illegally hacked sites. Our algorithms weren't doing the best job on hacked sites, so the manual team kept an eye out for hacked sites to remove them (and often to alert the website owners that they'd been hacked). The data generated by the manual team helped us build and deploy multiple new algorithms to detect hacked sites, leading to a 90% reduction in the number of hacked sites showing up in Google's search results in the past few months. That decrease in hacked spam in turn frees up the manual team to tackle the next bleeding-edge technique the spammers use. I suspect every major search engine uses similar approaches: try to stop the majority of spam with algorithms, but be willing to take action in the mean time while engineers work to improve the algorithms. |
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