Exasperated by the repeated gamification of search rankings that destroys the quality of results, Google announced a search quality update to improve website rankings while overhauling its spam policies. These measures are aimed at addressing low-quality content outside of search, which the company often blames on its search engine optimization efforts.
“In 2022, we began adjusting our ranking system to reduce useless, unoriginal content on search and keep it at a very low level. They say it will be reflected in an update. new blog post. The company has been fighting the SEO industry for years to reduce instances where high-ranking websites fail to deliver quality content.
Write for people, not search engines
In a post, Elizabeth Tucker, Google's director of product management, cited two key changes made to improve search quality and result usefulness. The first of these relates to improving quality rankings, with Google making “algorithmic enhancements” to its ranking system to display the most useful information on the web and “reducing unoriginal information within search results.” Content” is being reduced.
The second upgrade relates to spam policies, where Google is updating its policies to exclude low-quality content from searches. The post mentions his expired website and obituary spam, which was repurposed as a spam repository by the new owners. This update is basically aimed at lowering the ranking of previous pages. “It was made for search engines, not humans.”
According to the blog, such sites either offer a poor user experience or appear to be designed to match very specific search queries. These are the pages (and websites) that Google is targeting with its latest efforts. The company estimates that this update, on top of its previous efforts, will reduce low-quality, unoriginal content by up to 40%.
AI-generated content is attracting Google's attention
In a detailed post on Search Central It's aimed at website developers and creators, but the company points out that artificial intelligence plays a big role in poor results. It notes that large-scale content creation methods often leverage “automation,” and that the level of sophistication of these technologies means that content can be created by humans, automation, or both. There is often confusion as to which combinations were created.
The company says its immediate focus is on fraudulent content creation at scale to boost search rankings. “Today, the way content is created at scale is more sophisticated, and it's not always clear whether content is being created purely through automation,” the blog post said, adding that Google uses content to drive search. Rankings added that it is strengthening its policy to focus on this behavior to create on a large scale.
“This allows us to take action on more types of content that create little or no value at scale, such as pages that appear to have answers to popular searches but fail to provide useful content. becomes possible.” The ranking changes “will directly address low-quality AI-generated content that is designed to attract clicks but doesn't add much inherent value,” spokeswoman Jennifer Kutz said. .
Google says content you're not happy with should be removed
“This update also addresses other types of content, content that may be primarily created by humans but that doesn't add much value to users. , to reduce the presence of pages that lack original content,” she said. The large-scale content abuse policy focuses on content created by humans, generative AI, or other automated means, she said in the same post.
Upcoming changes will also address reputational abuse for websites that feature valuable content while also hosting low-quality content from third parties on their domains. Google gives the example of including payday he loan reviews on an educational website to gain a ranking advantage. The same thing happens with product review websites that no longer do field testing, but instead pretend to actually do field testing.
An obvious response to growing market mistrust
These recent actions are clearly the result of recent research efforts that have found that Google's search quality is declining. One of them was done by 404 Media and the report was headlined “Google search has gotten really bad”. Websites that address niche markets agreed with this view, as spam content often drowns out human-driven, expert research and analysis.
Google is seriously working on this issue, but it remains to be seen how users will react to this effort. Especially when emerging competitors like Arc's web browser are deploying AI to summarize information at the expense of website traffic.
This also comes as Google has announced that the new policy will come into effect by May 5th, as it wants to give website owners enough time to make the necessary changes to remain in Google's good books. It's a waiting game for us.