Google has announced an update to its search algorithms that should provide more useful content to the user, while at the same time, more results will be labeled as spam. The company is “refining” its ranking system to better determine whether web pages are truly useful or have a poor user experience and whether they are designed for search engines rather than people.
We're talking about search engine optimized (SEO) content that may be too 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 affect “sites built 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 estimates, while driving more traffic to useful, high-quality sites.
Google says the March 2024 update will be more comprehensive than regular major updates because it makes changes to several key systems. Updates may take up to a month to roll out.
“We have improved our core rating systems to deliver more useful results using a variety of innovative signals and approaches. There is no longer a single signal or system for this, and we have also added a new FAQ page to explain these changes.”
Google will also classify more things as spam. The updated content abuse policy will allow Google to take action on more content “with little or no value, such as pages that purport to answer popular search queries but do not provide useful content.”
“To better combat these practices, we are strengthening our policies to focus on this abusive behavior—creating content to improve search rankings—whether automation, humans, or a combination of the two is involved.”
Google's changes also target sites that may have good original content but host low-quality “affiliate” content provided by third parties in order to capitalize on the site's reputation. The practice will be considered spam, and from May 5, measures will be in place 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 ranking. Such a high ranking of content in Search can confuse or mislead visitors who have very different expectations of the content of a particular site.”
Google will also consider domains “that are purchased and repurposed to improve the ranking of low-quality content in search results” as spam.
Source: 9to5google
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