In the ongoing cat and mouse game of Google search versus search engine optimization (SEO) companies, Google seems to be losing lately. Search feels less useful with each passing day as the ChatGPT era has unleashed a tsunami of AI junk that quickly fills search results. Google played a big role in creating all of this with its invention of the Transformers, and now it’s finally doing something about it. A new blog entry details efforts to reduce “junk and low-quality content in Search.”
Google’s post describes a “core March 2024 update” to its ranking algorithms that it says will show fewer results that “are unhelpful, have a poor user experience, or feel built for search engines instead of of people”. Google says this “could include sites built primarily to match very specific search queries” and people who “produce content at scale to increase search rankings.” The company says that “based on our assessments, we expect the combination of this update and our previous efforts to collectively reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40.”
Google’s post is incredibly well written not to mention the AI. Google says it wants to “address emerging tactics” such as “using automation to generate low-quality or unoriginal content at scale.” Google also notes that “These days, content creation methods at scale are more sophisticated,” but what new “content creation methods” spammers are using remains a mystery. Google wants to become an early bird in AI now. Apparently, that means never directly mentioning any of the downsides of the AI-powered Internet that Google played a role in creating.
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Google’s response comes after there have been several high-profile search spam stories of late. A viral post by X boasted about an artificial intelligence “SEO Heist“where a website copied a competing website with AI, was able to rank higher than the site they copied from and, by their own admission,”stolen” 3.6 million page views. A recent study by the University of Leipzig, Bauhaus University Weimar and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence claimed that Google was losing the war with SEO companies. Another product review site post HouseFresh detailed how Google doesn’t really prioritize quality review articles and instead only allows big publishers to spam low-quality affiliate link articles on the first pages of search results.
Google’s vague statement that it might kill sites “built primarily to match very specific search queries” could be interpreted as a shot at the world of affiliate link articles. Google also says it wants to stop “site reputation abuse” where “websites that have their own great content may also host low-quality content provided by third parties in order to capitalize on the site’s strong reputation.” ‘accommodation’. (If that means I get less spam for “Ars Technica guest posts,” that’d be great.) Another change included in the stack is “expired domain abuse: where domains recently expired will be discounted.
It’s hard to know what Google considers “low-quality content.” Google policies still do not penalize Websites generated by artificial intelligence and just the other day they were captured paid news sites to create AI-generated articles. As a user, I think if I wanted to see AI content, I could go to an AI topic and generate it myself. Using Google Search in the past has always meant that you were looking for articles written by humans (admittedly with varying degrees of effort), and to me it makes sense to keep it that way. However, Google is still reluctant to ban AI altogether (again, it wants to be an AI company now).
With AI quickly becoming ubiquitous on the Internet, including at the top of Google Search if you turn it on, having search links meet strict quality standards seems like it will soon be their only point of differentiation. In the new world of AI, if Google is not aggressive enough with search quality, it risks losing users. If the first 10 blue links are not up to par, people can ask ChatGPT.
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