To stay on top, Google is always trying to improve its search engine, both in how it presents the information it has to searchers and how it finds that information in the first place. If it can’t give people the answers they’re looking for, why would they keep turning to the big G? In its latest round of changes (called the Useful Content Update), Google says it’s trying to show “more content by people, for people” in search results by targeting sites that try to game their results pages with low-quality, algorithmically generated content. Instead, it says it will prioritize original content and product reviews from experts.
For most people, customer-facing changes will always be the most obvious. Think about things like the quick reply box you see at the top of more and more searches (officially called Highlights), Google’s AI-powered efforts last year to provide more comprehensive search suggestions to complex queries and the knowledge graph, which is what tells you actors’ birthdays, moon phases and other facts when you look them up. These are all important and visible changes to the way Google presents information about what you’ve searched for that are designed to help you find what you’re looking for faster.
But while these front-end changes may seem dramatic, especially considering how the Google Search page has changed over the years, it’s the backend tweaks that can have the most profound effects on the results you see. In the past, Popular sites have essentially been removed from the top results through updates to Google’s search algorithms.
A big part of Google’s problem is search engine optimization, or SEO. While not inherently bad, sites can take SEO too far by trying to game Google’s results pages. At its most benign, SEO is simply taking sensible steps to ensure that Google can understand and access the content you publish, and make sure it loads quickly and is readable by everyone. (Google doesn’t want to show a link to a site that takes ages to load, and even when it does, it’s unreadable on mobile devices.)
For the most part, this means making sure that your content is written logically, that you include the kind of key phrases that people are actually searching for, and that your site is well made and maintained. When it comes to individual articles, ideally they should set out to answer a question and then actually answer it. And whether you’re viewing the article on a computer or smartphone, it should look good and load quickly. In short, a win for all.
But there is also the dark side. Online, traffic is money. If you get people to visit your website and see ads, you get paid. The higher your site appears in Google’s rankings on average, the more traffic it will receive, and thus the more money you will earn. The incentives to try and play with Google’s algorithms are pretty clear.
You’ve almost certainly come across SEO-based sites that are set up just to get traffic and not really help people. For example, millions of people (including many of us here at PopSci) are eagerly awaiting the third season of Ted Lasso. The release date hasn’t been announced yet, but if you google “ted lasso season 3 release date” you’ll get a dozen sites with headlines that make it sound like it is. Likewise, there are many automated sites that delete content from the entire web and repackage it with ads, without adding anything else of value. Google’s latest update targets these types of sites.
This is all part of Google’s larger strategy to promote useful and relevant content. An update at the beginning of the year, for example, aimed to show better product reviews. It was designed to rank in-depth, well-researched, practical reviews written by people with experience with the product rather than just summaries.
this latest useful content update is adopting a similar strategy and aims to promote content that is “by the people, for the people.” In other words, things that are written to be read by humans, not Google’s search algorithms. It says it will do this by ranking original content higher, rather than articles that aggregate publicly available information for nothing, and by promoting expert reviews.
If you manage a site and are concerned that Google is about to strip away some of your hard-earned (or barely-earned) traffic, you can check out a guide posted on what creators should know about the update. If you just want to know more about how Google search works, this is also a good read.
Finally, if you’re interested in trying a non-Google search engine, check it out brave or DuckDuckGo.
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