Angered by repeated gamification of search rankings destroying the quality of its results, Google has now announced a search quality update to improve its website rankings while revising its spam policies. These measures are aimed at addressing low-quality search content that the company has often attributed to search engine optimization efforts.
“In 2022, we started adjusting our ranking systems to reduce unhelpful and unoriginal content in Search and keep it at very low levels. We’re bringing what we’ve learned from this work to the core update of March 2024, says Google in a new blog entry. The company has battled the SEO industry over the years to reduce the instances of quality content not delivering high-ranking websites.
Write for people, not search engines
In the post, Elizabeth Tucker, Google’s Director of Product Management, listed two key changes being made to improve the quality of search and the usefulness of results. The first of these relates to improving Quality Ranking where Google is making “algorithmic improvements” to its ranking systems to show the most useful information on the web and reduce “unoriginal content in search results”.
The second update concerns their spam policies where Google updates them to keep lower quality content out of Search. The post refers to defunct websites repurposed as spam repositories by new owners and obituary spam. The update basically aims to reduce the pages that were “built for search engines, not people.”
According to the blog, these sites either have a poor user experience or are apparently designed to match a very specific search query. These are the pages (and websites) that Google aims to target with its latest efforts. The company estimates that this update, in addition to previous efforts, would reduce low-quality and unoriginal content by up to 40%.
AI-generated content is on Google’s radar
In a detailed post on Search Central which is aimed at developers and website builders, the company notes that artificial intelligence was having a significant impact on poor results. He claims that methods of creating content at scale often take advantage of “automation”, so the levels of sophistication of these technologies often lead to confusion as to whether it was created by humans, or automation, or a combination of the two .
The company says its immediate focus would be on the abusive behavior of content creation at scale to boost search rankings. “Today, methods of creating content at scale are more sophisticated, and whether content is created solely through automation is not always clear,” the blog post notes, adding that Google was strengthening its policy to focus in this behavior of producing content at scale to drive search. classification
“This will allow us to act on more types of content with little or no value created at scale, such as pages that claim to have answers to popular searches but don’t provide useful content.” The rating changes “will directly address low-quality AI-generated content designed to attract clicks, but that doesn’t add much original value,” says spokeswoman Jennifer Kutz.
Dissatisfied content must go, says Google
“The updates will also address other types of content: content that may be primarily created by humans, but that doesn’t add much value to users. The ultimate goal is to reduce the presence of pages that are unsatisfactory and lack original content.” he said. The content abuse policy at scale will focus on content created by humans, generative AI or other automated means, the post says.
The upcoming changes will also address site reputation abuse where websites include valuable content while hosting low-quality third-party stuff on their domain. Google cites an example of how educational websites can include payday loan reviews to gain ranking benefits. The same can be done with product review websites that no longer do hands-on testing, but pretend to do so.
An obvious response to the growing mistrust of the market
These recent measures are obviously the result of some recent research efforts that found the quality of Google search to be declining. One of them was made by 404 Media who titled their report “Google search has really gotten worse“. Websites that address niche markets agreed with this view, as spam content often drowned out their human-led expert research and analysis.
Now that Google has taken the matter seriously, it remains to be seen how its users respond to the efforts. Even more so when upstart competitors like Arc Web Browser look to deploy AI to digest information at the expense of website traffic.
This is another game that awaits us now, as Google says its new policies will go into effect on May 5, as the company wants to give website owners enough time to make the necessary changes to stay in the good books of google.
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