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by Matt_Cutts
5357 days ago
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option1138, I'm afraid you need to recalibrate your expectations of spam on the web. Blekko made a site called Spam Clock that estimates 1 million spam pages are created every hour: http://www.spamclock.com/ . There's 200+ million websites out there. 1,000 spam sites would be a spam rate of 5.0 × 10^-6. If you remember the days of Altavista before Google, the actual rate of spam on the web is much higher. Here's one stat: I once heard a search engine rep (not from Google) say that they had to crawl 20 billion pages to find 1 billion non-spam pages. So yes, we do tackle more than 1,000 websites a year. There's a ton of spam on the web, and Google has to operate on the scale of the web (e.g. in 40 different languages) to tackle all that spam. |
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You are of course correct. The fault is mine for miscommunicating... I find myself becoming less self-editorial these days when I write on the web and tend to think everyone is on the same page as I am.
I was actually referring to an informal study I did earlier this year. I measured sites which were receiving an average of 50,000 or more visitors from Google US search (organic) per month over a six month period. Then I compared those with a similar set from a subsequent six month period to see which had significantly dropped off in traffic and rankings. The purpose of this was to estimate the number of significant sites which were penalized over that period of time. The final estimate came to about 700 sites/year which were penalized. There are lots of uncontrolled variables here of course... but I was looking for an "order of magnitude" answer simply for curiosity's sake.
The 1 million spam pages created per day were of course excluded from consideration as they never received much traffic from Google in the first place.
So just to clarify my earlier response, I am advocating for a policy that would apply to websites exceeding a certain threshold of organic traffic for a significant period of time.