Despite the efforts of competitors like Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo, Google remains the king of search. But loyalty also has its flaws. Over the past few years, you may have noticed that Google's overall search quality has declined and that it's increasingly returning low-quality posts that are being exploited by the system to get to the top of the results page.
The good news is that Google seems to be tired of SEO spam, too. The company announced Tuesday that it will roll out search changes in the March 2024 core update to reduce the number of spam posts and return high-quality, accurate results for queries. These changes include algorithm updates that strengthen Google's core ranking system and improvements to the company's spam policies.
First, let's take a look at these core ranking systems. The algorithm enhancements Google implements are specifically designed to hit important search terms, rather than help readers learn if a website is useless or provides a bad experience for users. He said that they will be able to better recognize what is being done to them. “Mostly because it matches very specific search queries.”
Google believes these changes could reduce the number of spam and low-quality sites that appear in certain search results by up to 40%. That's good for everyone except the sites pumping out this content. Google has also updated its spam policy, and next he makes three important changes.
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Abuse of expired domains: This tactic involves taking over an expired website and leveraging its previous readership and credibility to publish low-quality content. An example from Google is “There was casino-related content on the site of an elementary school.'' So please don't do that.
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Massive Content Abuse: Look for sites that pump out low-quality content in order to rank in search. Google prohibits this behavior, whether it's AI-generated pages, sites that scrape the web to generate content, or just accidentally publish irrelevant garbage full of search keywords.
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Abuse of site reputation: This happens when a high-quality site hosts a third-party low-quality page in order to improve the low-quality posts based on the main site's reputation. This is the only policy change that Google hasn't rolled out yet, so I think this is happening more often than you think. Instead, the company is giving site owners until May 5 to clean up their act.
Hopefully these new changes will cut down on the BS and restore some of the quality of the once faithful Google search. Sure, this won't solve all of Google's problems, and privacy-conscious people won't switch from DuckDuckGo or Startpage, but spam and low-quality content are the last thing most of us want. It's welcome to prevent it from bothering the search engines you use. development, especially as his AI-generated content continues to grow.