Google is tweaking its algorithms to better weed out spam and automated content amid complaints that the quality of its search results has declined. The company says that the ranking update, which will be announced in May, will “remove low-quality content from search.” Most notably, Google says its engine is great at eradicating today's automated (AI-generated) content that is difficult to discover.
Google said it is applying learnings from its 2022 algorithm tweaks to the new update to “reduce useless and unoriginal content.” The company says the changes will increase traffic to “informative, high-quality sites.” Combined with an update from two years ago, Google estimates that this revision will reduce spammy and unoriginal search results by 40%.
Elizabeth Tucker, Google's director of product management, said: “This update may not be helpful if your web pages are useless, have a poor user experience, or seem like they were created for search engines rather than people.'' This includes making improvements to some of our core ranking systems to better understand how people feel.” “This may include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries.”
Google appears to be targeting AI-generated SEO spam with a note on massive content abuse. The company says it's ramping up its efforts to tackle the growing problem of sites that generate garbage automated articles (and is also focusing on old-school human-generated spam).
“Currently, scaled-up content creation methods are more sophisticated, and it's not always clear whether content is being created purely through automation,” Tucker said. Google says the changes will “help address more types of content that create little value at scale, such as pages that pretend to have answers to popular searches but fail to provide useful content.” “We will be able to take action based on this,” he said.
Given the growing problem of AI-generated content farms shotgunning content to attack systems, Google's changes will be welcome if they are as effective as promised. Sites spamming only that content may be easier to spot, but it will be interesting to see if a scenario arises where a once-reputable media outlet experiments with AI-generated spam (CNET and sports illustrated (is a recent example) are affected.
Another change to the algorithm will tackle the practice of reputable sites hosting low-quality content from third parties designed to undermine a site's reputation. Google provides an example of an educational site that hosts third-party payday loan reviews. “Going forward, we will consider very low-value third-party content that is created primarily for ranking purposes and without the website owner's close monitoring as spam,” Tucker wrote.
Finally, Google's updates are said to be effective in eradicating expired domains that someone has purchased and turned into clickmills. Search engines start treating these websites as spam.
Google has given site owners two months' notice to adapt accordingly, so improvements may not be immediate. Search engine changes will take effect on May 5th.