Google is looking out for its users!
Since the 5th of October, Google has been rolling out further algorithmic changes since the update to Panda 4.2. The purpose of these changes is to remove hacked spam from organic search results – a cause that Google is pursuing aggressively in an attempt to protect users and webmasters from the potentially harmful affects of hacked, spam domains.
Spammers and cyber criminals frequently target the websites of small businesses, as the website owners often don’t implement standard best practices for web-security. Spammers damage these easier target sites to gain rank and traffic in Google.
Google has said that a “huge amount of legitimate sites are hacked by spammers and used to engage in abusive behaviour, such as malware download, promotion of traffic to low quality sites… and marketing of counterfeit goods or illegal pharmaceutical drugs”. The new algorithm changes will remove hacked spam content from search results and retain the legitimate organic results for a better, safer user experience.
You can read Google’s anti-spam algorithm announcement in full here.