Google is well-known for its algorithm changes that have a tendency to shake things up where its search results are concerned, and its next series of changes to its search algorithms are no exception to that trend.
According to Google sources, the company is turning up the heat on hacked sites and its next set of algorithm changes will ‘aggressively’ target hacked spam in its search results. This could lead to some monumental changes to its search results pages, including pages having far fewer search results than in the past.
Google recently said, “We are aggressively targeting hacked spam in order to protect users and webmasters. The algorithmic changes will eventually impact roughly 5% of queries, depending on the language. As we roll out the new algorithms, users might notice that for certain queries, only the most relevant results are shown, reducing the number of results shown.”
The reduction in the number of search results shown on pages is due to the sheer amount of spam being removed from Google’s search results pages at the moment in order to ‘weed out the bad content’ and retain what are known as ‘organic’ or ‘legitimate’ search results.
Hacked sites are a common problem, one that has affected users, website owners and companies, including Google, for many years. In 2013, Google revealed that hacked websites were the second most common cause of manual actions, and in response to what is still seen as a growing issue, launched its help centre for hacked sites.