Google has released a new “How we fought webspam” report for 2015, and it has some interesting insights similar to the ones shared by Juan Felipe Rincón at SMX West earlier this year.

Hacked Sites

They say hacked sites continue to be a major issue…. a 180% increase in the number of sites being hacked over the previous year.  On their research blog earlier this year, Google said they identified over 800,000 hacked sites.

Other Manual Actions

Google sent more than 4.3 million messages to webmasters about manual actions taken on their sites.  And Rincón revealed at SMX West that they send more manual actions for hacked sites than anything else.  But that is still a significant number of manual actions that aren’t hacked site related.

They saw an increase of thin, low quality content, which presumably resulted in manual actions.

Spam Reports

Rincón mentioned this at SMX West, although with slightly lower overall numbers for spam reports.  In the blog post Google says they receive 400,000 spam reports that are prioritized.  Google then acts on 65% of them, of which 80% are spam.

Webmaster Outreach

Google did more than 200 office hour hangouts and live events over the last year, in 17 different languages.

The help forums had tens of thousands of questions answered, and 35,000 of those came from Top Contributors.

You can read the full report here.