Most SEO marketers and webmasters are well aware of the name Matt Cutts, the head of webspam at Google. Speaking in a recent video, launched on YouTube, Cutts revealed new statistics regarding the different types of notifications that Google sends via its Google Webmaster Tools.
He said that hundreds of thousands messages are sent to webmasters on a monthly basis, with nine in ten of those being related to black hat SEO. About 4% of the messages regarded content that had little or no added value and consequently, was not ranked high in search results, 3% refer to hacking, 2% were about link buying and 1% refer to link selling.
Although the number of messages sent might seem high, it was estimated that millions of spam pages are created every hour. Google spends a lot of time trying to find spam on the Internet and when it does, it automatically sends a message via its Webmaster Tools. All of the various types of spam are addressed, with about ten different types of message that webmasters can receive from the search engine. For example, hidden texts and keyword stuffing would be included in one message that Google sends, Cutts explained.
In December, Search Engine Land published an update on Google Webmaster Tools messages, which painted a similar picture — 90% of the notifications sent by Google were related to black hat and 3% were about unnatural links. A few months ago, Cutts stated that some 700,000 notifications were sent over a period of two months last year.