Google is rolling out several measures aimed at improving the quality of its search results starting today.
Google releases the March 2024 Core Update and a series of spam updates (known as the March 2024 Spam Update). In addition, Google’s useful content system has been incorporated into its overall core ranking system.
In addition, Google announced several new and updated spam policies that it will begin enforcing through automated algorithms and manual actions.
March 2024 core update, bigger than before
Today, Google began rolling out its first core update of the year and its first algorithm update of the year: the March 2024 Core Update.
Elizabeth Tucker, Product Manager, Google Search, told Search Engine Land that the update will help reduce unhelpful content on Google Search by 40%.
“We expect the combination of this update and our previous efforts to collectively reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%,” Tucker. he wrote.
The March 2024 Core Update may take up to a month to roll out. Several systems will be updated and released during the update.
This update, unlike some previous core updates, includes improvements to several components of the overall core system. This March Core Update will have multiple updates, as this update touched multiple systems within the Core Update, Google will roll out updates to these systems over the next few weeks.
The March 2024 core update is “a more complex update than our regular core updates,” said Chris Nelson of Google’s search quality team. Google made “changes to several core systems,” he added.
Google improved its core ranking systems to show more useful results using a variety of signals and innovative approaches (more on that later).
In fact, because Google is updating multiple core systems, “there will be more fluctuation in ranking than with a regular core update, as the different systems are fully updated and mutually reinforcing,” Nelson added.
Google said this update has refined the way it understands which web pages are “unhelpful, have a poor user experience, or feel like they were built for search engines rather than people.” This “could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries,” Google added.
Previous core updates. Here’s a timeline and our coverage of recent core updates:
The useful content update is now part of the core updates
With this March 2024 core update, Google will stop announcing new feature updates as the feature content system has been incorporated into the main update system.
The last useful content update, the September 2023 useful content update, was a large update that affected several sites. Hopefully, some affected sites will see relief from this March 2024 core update, but it’s hard to tell at this point.
The useful content system classifier was revised and is now included in the March 2024 core update.
But helpful content classifiers aren’t the only system that’s part of this March 2024 Core Update. In fact, Google said that work on the March 2024 Core Update began with the update of useful content from 2022.
What to do if your ranking drops. Here’s the advice Google has given in the past for those negatively affected by a core update:
There are no specific actions to take to recover. A negative impact on rankings may not indicate a problem with your pages. Answer these questions to assess the quality of your content. Expect another core update. You might see some improvements between core updates, but the biggest changes will happen after another core update.
In short, write content that is useful to people and not to rank in search engines.
“There is nothing new or special that creators need to do for this update as long as they have made satisfying content meant for people. For those who may not be ranked as well, we encourage you to read our creating useful, reliable and people-centric content help page,” Nelson explained.
March 2024 Spam Updates
Google also announced the release of new spam updates, which it calls the March 2024 Spam Update, and spam policy updates to complement the release of the March 2024 Core Update.
Two of these spam updates will result in manual and automatic actions this week. The site reputation abuse spam update will take effect two months from today, May 5th.
Content abuse search spam at scale
Content Abuse Search Spam at Scale is an update to the old “spam auto-generated content” policy that now goes beyond “spam auto-generated content” and now includes any production method of content at scale for the purpose of ranking in search.
Google said that producing content at scale to boost search rankings, whether with automation, people or a combination, is against its guidelines.
“This will allow us to act on more types of content with little or no value created at scale, such as pages that purport to have answers to popular searches but don’t provide useful content,” Google wrote.
What are some examples of pages that claim to have answers but don’t? Tucker explained that these are the pages that start out saying they’re going to answer your question, funnel you through low-quality content, and never end up giving you the answer to your questions:
“Our long-standing spam policy has been that the use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is to manipulate ranking in search results. The updated policy follows suit spirit of our previous policy and is based on the same principle It has been expanded to account for more sophisticated methods of content creation at scale where it is not always clear whether low-quality content was created solely by automation .” Our new policy aims to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if it is done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings, and that this applies both if there is automation like people.”
This week Google will begin cracking down on content abuse at scale through both algorithmic spamming systems and manual actions.
Expired domain abuse is now considered spam
“Expired domain abuse,” the practice of buying expired domains and repurposing them with the “intent of increasing search rankings for low-quality content,” is now considered spam, Tucker said.
This technique can try to trick users into thinking that a new domain’s content is part of the old site, when it might not be.
This is a specific and clear message to content creators not to buy expired domains with the intention of reusing those domains for the purpose of ranking in Google Search.
This week Google will begin cracking down on the abuse of expired domains through both algorithmic spamming systems and manual actions.
Site reputation abuse (also known as SEO Parasite) is also spam
Google has a new “abuse of site reputation” policy, some SEOs have been calling it “parasite SEO”, where third party sites host low quality content provided by third parties to take advantage of their ranking power third party websites. Google explained that “a third party might post payday loan reviews on a trusted educational website to gain site ranking benefits.”
“Such content that ranks highly in search can confuse or mislead visitors who may have very different expectations of the content on a given website,” Google added.
This new policy clarifies that “third-party content produced primarily for ranking purposes and without close oversight by a website owner is spam.”
But this new policy does not consider all third-party content to be infringing. Google said “only that which is hosted without close supervision and which is intended to manipulate search rankings”.
Google provided this example:
“Many publications host advertising content aimed at their regular readers, rather than primarily manipulating search rankings. Sometimes called ‘native advertising’ or ‘advertising’, this type of content would not normally confuse regular readers of the publication when they find it directly to the publisher’s site or when they arrive there from Google search results.”
Google said it provides two months’ notice of this policy and will begin taking both manual and automated actions on this abuse within two months. The specific date is May 5.
Why we care
Over the past few months there have been numerous complaints and studies about how Google search is getting worse. The content on the web just isn’t great, and Google seems to have been ranking big sites over smaller sites, where Reddit has been dominating Google search results lately.
When I asked about the proliferation of Reddit rankings, a Google spokesperson responded:
“We know that for some queries, people are really looking for content that comes from other people with relevant experiences. We want to show the content that people are looking for, in cases where it’s useful. There’s high-quality content and low-quality across all content types, including user-generated forum and discussion content.Our goal is to showcase the best of the web, and we believe these ranking improvements will help us showcase discussion/forum content higher quality for searches where it’s useful, and they’ll help us better detect when that content is actually useful.”
Google said the ranking changes were made before any relationship with Reddit.
“We’ve been working to make it easier to find content that reflects the first-hand perspectives of all kinds of sites in our search results, including hundreds of forum sites. This ranking improvement was released earlier and is independent of Reddit partnership,” the spokesperson told Search Engine Land.
Criticism that the quality of Google’s search results is not up to par is nothing new. They echo what former Search Engine Land editor Danny Sullivan wrote in 2017 in A Deep Look at Google’s Biggest Search Quality Crisis.
Sullivan, now the official Google search link, has been promising this and future updates that address the quality issue. In November, Google advised us to “fasten our seat belts”. the company he reiterated this in January I again in February. Is this the Google update we’ve been waiting for?
Google will publish on its Search status panel when updates are made and we’ll post a story here as well.
[ad_2]
Source link
