Google has announced an update to its search algorithm that will provide users with more useful content while more results will be classified as spam. The company is “improving” its ranking system to better determine whether a web page is truly useful, has a poor user experience, or is not designed for search engines rather than humans.
This refers to search engine optimized (SEO) content. These pieces of content are too long, redundant, and serve no purpose other than looking good to Google's algorithms. Google's concern is that large-scale language models and generative AI models will exacerbate this problem. The company says the change applies to “sites created primarily to match very specific search queries.”
According to Google's estimates, this update aims to reduce the amount of low-quality, unoriginal content in search by about 40% and drive more traffic to useful, high-quality sites.
Google says the March 2024 update will be more comprehensive, but will also be more complex than a typical major update, as it will include changes to several key systems. Updates may take up to a month to deploy.
«We have improved our core rating system to provide more useful results using a variety of innovative signals and approaches. No single signal or system is used for this purpose anymore, and we've also added a new FAQ page explaining these changes.
Google will classify even more as spam. With the updated Content Abuse Policy, Google will be more aggressive about “content of little or no value, such as pages that offer no useful content, such as pages that claim to have answers to popular search queries.” You will be able to take action.
“To better address these techniques, we have strengthened our policies to focus on the following aggressive practices: the creation of content to improve search rankings, whether by automation, humans, or a combination of both. I am.”
Google's changes also target sites that may have great original content but post low-quality “affiliate” content provided by third parties in order to capitalize on the site's reputation. This behavior will be considered spam, and measures will be introduced on May 5th to force sites to change their behavior.
«For example, a third party may post payday loan reviews on a reputable educational website in order to benefit from the site's ranking. Such high content her ranking in search can confuse or mislead visitors who have completely different expectations for the content of a particular site.
Google also considers domains that are “purchased and reused to boost the ranking of low-quality content in search results” to be spam.
Source: 9to5google