Google Guns for SEO Industry
The company’s search quality update aims to keep low quality content out of search pages
Irked by the repeated gamification of search rankings that destroy the quality of its results, Google has now announced a search quality update to improve its ranking of websites while also revisiting its spam policies. These measures aim to address low-quality content out of search that the company has often blamed on search-engine optimization efforts.
“In 2022, we began tuning our ranking systems to reduce unhelpful, unoriginal content on Search and keep it at very low levels. We’re bringing what we learned from that work into the March 2024 core update, Google says in a new blog post. The company has battled the SEO industry over the years to reduce instances of quality content not being delivered by websites with a high ranking.
Write for people, not for search engines
In the post, Elizabeth Tucker, Director, Product Management at Google listed out two key changes being made to enhance search quality and helpfulness of results. The first of these relates to improved quality ranking where Google is making “algorithmic enhancements” to their ranking systems to surface most helpful information on the web and reduce “unoriginal content in search results.”
The second upgrade relates to their spam policies where Google is updating them to keep the lowest-quality content out of Search. The post refers to expired websites repurposed as spam repositories by new owners and obituary spam. The update essentially aims to downrank pages that were “created for search engines, instead of for people.”
According to the blog, such sites have a poor user experience or are seemingly designed to match a very specific search query. These are the pages (and websites) that Google aims to target with its latest efforts. The company estimates that this update on top of prior efforts would reduce low-quality and unoriginal content by as much as 40%.
AI-generated content is on Google’s radar
In a detailed post on Search Central that is aimed at website developers and creators, the company notes that artificial intelligence was having a major impact on the poor results. It states that scaled content creation methods often leverage “automation” whereby the sophistication levels of these technologies often creates confusion around whether it was created by humans, or automation or through a combination of both.
The company says its immediate focus would be on the abusive behavior of creating content at scale to boost search rankings. “Today, scaled content creation methods are more sophisticated and whether content is created purely through automation isn’t always clear,” the blog post notes, adding that Google was strengthening its policy to focus on this behavior of producing content at scale to boost search ranking.
“This will allow us to take action on more types of content with little to no value created at scale, like pages that pretend to have answers to popular searches but fail to deliver helpful content.” The ranking changes will “directly address low-quality AI-generated content that’s designed to attract clicks, but that doesn’t add much original value,” says spokesperson Jennifer Kutz.
Unsatisfying content has to go, says Google
“The updates will also address other types of content — content that may be primarily created by humans but that doesn’t add much value for users. The ultimate goal is reducing the presence of pages that feel unsatisfying, and lack original content,” she said. The scale content abuse policy will focus on content that’s created by humans, generative AI, or other automated means, says the post.
The upcoming changes will also address the site reputation abuse where websites feature valuable content while also hosting low-quality stuff from third parties on their domain. Google cites an example of how educational websites may include payday loan reviews to gain ranking benefits. The same can also be done with product review websites that no longer do hands-on testing but pretend to do so.
An obvious response to market’s growing distrust
These recent measures are obviously a result of some recent research efforts that found Google’s search quality diminishing. One of these was done by 404 Media which headlined its report “Google search really has gotten worse”. Websites tackling niche markets agreed with this view as spam content often drowned out their human-led expert research and analysis.
Now that Google has seriously taken up the matter, it remains to be seen how its users respond to the efforts. More so, when fledgling competitors like Arc’s web browser are looking to deploy AI to summarize information at the expense of website traffic.
This is another waiting game for us now as Google says its new policies would go into effect by May 5 as the company wants to give adequate time to website owners to make the changes required to stay in Google’s good books.
