News Courtesy of SearchEngineLand.com:
Google’s global search outreach lead Juan Felipe Rincon has shared some updated metrics on Google’s spam-preventive measures over the past year. The interesting data point is that Google sent around 3 million fewer manual action notices this year than last year.
Last year, Google told us it sent 9 million web spam notices through Google Search Console. This year, that number dropped down to “6 million manual action messages to webmasters about practices we identified that were against our guidelines,” Google wrote. In 2016, that metric was closer to 4 million notifications related to search spam.
Google also sent “over 45 million notifications to registered website owners alerting them to possible problems with their websites which could affect their appearance in search,” but not all of those are related to search spam. In fact, only 6 million of those were search spam-related.
Ryan’s Take 
Registering your website with Google’s Webmaster Tools and Search Console should be one of the first things done after the site is set live. Not only does it help with monitoring SEO and indexing, but it can also provide warnings you might not be aware of. Display issues or even malware can appear at any time and usually Google can catch it and give a heads up before it impacts your rankings.
Fortunately, I’ve never received a notice for a spam penalty. I certainly don’t practice any questionable techniques. However, I do get messages for indexing issues on occasion. Most of the time it is due to a redirect problem of some sort. An easy fix for sure, but if left uncorrected could cause problems in the SERPs.
What I find most interesting from this article is that 80% of hacked or compromised websites were removed from the search results. It’s a scary thing to see a notice next to your website in the search results stating “this website might be hacked”. I’d actually prefer if it were temporarily removed from Google while the problem is being addressed. It seems like Google agrees as removal helps to eliminate the spread of malware and infection.
