Google Made More Linking Practices Less Effective at Manipulating Rankings

In Google’s newly released webspam report, the company reveals how it dealt with link spam in 2018.Link spam is one of three types of spam discussed in the report. Other standouts include spam on hacked sites and user-generated spam.Here’s more about how Google fought those types of spam last year. Link spam refers to any type of link building practice that violates Google’s webmaster guidelines.Google stresses the value of links as a search ranking factor when explaining why it’s important to fight link spam. Egregious link spam is dealt with swiftly, Google says. A number of link building practices were even made less effective last year. Without getting too specific, Google says it “made a number of bad linking practices less effective for manipulating ranking.