People use search every day to discover the best the web has to offer. We've long had policies and automated systems in place to combat spammers, and we're working to address new tactics that try to cheat results with low-quality content. We regularly update these policies and systems to effectively address these trends, continue to provide useful content, and connect people to high-quality websites.
Today, we're announcing important changes we're making to improve the quality of search and the usefulness of results.
- Improved quality ranking: We're enhancing our core ranking system algorithms to ensure we show you the most useful information on the web and reduce unoriginal content in search results.
- New and improved spam policy: We're updating our spam policy to exclude low-quality content from searches, such as outdated websites and obituary spam that have been repurposed as spam repositories by new owners.
Reducing low quality and unoriginal results
In 2022, Google began adjusting its ranking system to reduce useless, unoriginal content on search and keep it at a very low level. He will incorporate what he learned from that work into the March 2024 core update.
This update includes improvements to our core ranking system to help you better understand if your web pages are useless, have a poor user experience, or feel like they were created for search engines rather than humans. Includes some improvements. This may include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries.
We believe these updates will reduce the amount of low-quality content on search and direct more traffic to useful, high-quality sites. Based on our evaluation, we expect this update, combined with our previous efforts, to reduce the amount of low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by a total of 40%.
Prevent results from containing spam
For decades, we've relied on sophisticated anti-spam systems and spam policies to prevent the lowest quality content from appearing in search results. And that effort continues today.
Google is making several updates to its spam policies to better address new and evolving abuses that result in unoriginal, low-quality content appearing in searches. Starting today, we will take action against more types of these manipulative practices. Our ranking system prevents many types of low-quality content from ranking highly in search, but this update allows for a more targeted response based on our spam policy. .
Massive Content Abuse
Google has long had a policy against using automation to generate low-quality or unoriginal content at scale for the purpose of manipulating search rankings. This policy was originally designed to address large content instances where automation was clearly involved.
Today, scaled content creation methods are more sophisticated, and it is not always clear whether content is being created purely by automation. To properly address these techniques, policies that focus on this fraudulent practice of creating content at scale to boost search rankings, regardless of whether automation, humans, or a combination thereof are involved. is being strengthened. This allows us to address 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. Masu.
Abuse of site reputation
In some cases, websites with good content of their own will also host lower quality content provided by third parties in order to take advantage of the hosting site's good reputation. For example, a third party may publish a Payday Her Loan review on a reputable educational website to gain a ranking advantage from the site. When such content ranks high in searches, it can confuse or mislead visitors who have completely different expectations for a particular website's content.
From now on, we will consider very low-value third-party content as spam, primarily for ranking purposes and without the close monitoring of the website owner. We will publish this policy two months before it goes into effect on May 5th so that site owners have time to make the necessary changes.
Abuse of expired domains
In some cases, expired domains are purchased and reused with the primary purpose of increasing search rankings for low-quality or non-original content. This can lead users to mistakenly think that the new content is part of the old site, when in fact it may not be. Expired domains that are purchased and reused to boost search rankings for low-quality content are considered spam.
Search helps people with billions of questions every day, but there are always areas where it can be improved. Google will continue to work hard to keep low-quality content on search at a low level and show more information designed to help people.