Google announced an update to its search algorithms which should provide more useful content to the user, while more results will be labeled as spam. The company «is refining» its ranking system to better determine whether web pages are truly useful, have a poor user experience, and are not designed for search engines rather than people.
This refers to search engine optimized (SEO) content that may be overly long, wordy, and have no benefit other than looking good to Google’s algorithms. Google’s concern is that large language and generative AI models will exacerbate this problem. According to the company, the changes will apply to «sites created primarily to match very specific search queries».
This update aims to reduce the amount of low-quality, unoriginal content in Search by about 40%, according to Google’s estimates, while directing more traffic to useful and high-quality sites.
Google says that the March 2024 update will be more comprehensive is more complex than a regular major update because it makes changes to several key systems. It can take up to a month to deploy updates.
«We have improved our core rating systems to deliver more useful results using a variety of innovative signals and approaches. No longer is a single signal or system used for this purpose, and we have also added a new FAQ page to explain these changes in».
Google will also classify more things as spam. The updated content abuse policy will allow Google to take action against more «content with little or no value, such as pages that purport to have answers to popular search queries but don’t provide useful» content.
«To better address these methods, we are strengthening our policies to focus on the following offensive behaviors — create content to increase search rankings — whether automation, humans, or a combination of both».
Google’s changes also target sites that may have good original content, but post «affiliate» low-quality content provided by third parties in order to capitalize on the site’s reputation. This practice will be considered spam, and measures will be introduced on May 5 to encourage sites to make changes.
«For example, a third party may post payday loan reviews on a trusted educational website to benefit from the site’s rankings. Such high content rankings in Search can be confusing or misleading to visitors who have very different expectations of the content of a particular site».
Google will also consider domains «that have been purchased and repurposed to increase the ranking of low-quality content in search results» as spam.
Source: 9to5google