Google is bringing out a major update where the search engine giant is changing its algorithm in a move to improve search quality. The company recently announced a significant update targeting low-quality, SEO-optimised content. This update comes in response to growing concerns about the prevalence of junk pages and spammy websites ranking high in search results.
Google in its blog states: “Every day, people turn to Search to find the best of what the web has to offer. We’ve long had policies and automated systems to fight against spammers, and we work to address emerging tactics that look to game our results with low-quality content”
The March 2024 core update as the company calls it will be more extensive and thorough in comparison to other updates.
What's the Problem?
For years, search engine optimization (SEO) has been used to manipulate search engine algorithms, sometimes at the expense of user experience. This has led to an increase in websites filled with irrelevant content, repetitive keywords, and misleading information, often ranking higher than genuine, informative pages. The consequences? Users end up frustrated and wasting time sifting through irrelevant content.
What are the New Changes?
Google's update focuses on two key areas:
Enhanced Quality Results:
Google’s new update will be refined so that it can better identify and downrank websites that prioritise SEO tactics over creating valuable content for users. This means that various factors like user engagement, content quality, website trustworthiness and usability will carry more weight in determining search ranking.
The company started filtering out irrelevant content in 2022 and will boost the process so that users can find quality and relevant content easily. The company believes that it will reduce the visibility of irrelevant content in the search results by 40%.
Google mentions: “This update involves refining some of our core ranking systems to help us better understand if webpages are unhelpful, have a poor user experience or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people. This could 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 send more traffic to helpful and high-quality sites. Based on our evaluations, we expect that the combination of this update and our previous efforts will collectively reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%,” it adds.
Updated Spam Policy:
The company is also working to update its spam policies, which will filter out unoriginal, low quality content. Google mentions: “We’re making several updates to our spam policies to better address new and evolving abusive practices that lead to unoriginal, low-quality content showing up on Search. We’ll take action on more types of these manipulative behaviors starting today. While our ranking systems keep many types of low-quality content from ranking highly on Search, these updates allow us to take more targeted action under our spam policies.”
Reduced Visibility of Scaled Content:
Google has had a policy for years under which it restrains using automation for creating low quality and unoriginal content on a large scale. This policy was implemented so that the company could root out the content created to manipulate search rankings.
That is why in the new update, Google is taking stricter measures to address this issue of content abuse. The company mentions: “Today, scaled content creation methods are more sophisticated, and whether content is created purely through automation isn't always as clear. To better address these techniques, we’re strengthening our policy to focus on this abusive behavior — producing content at scale to boost search ranking — whether automation, humans or a combination are involved.”
Abuse of Site Reputation
There are times when sites with good content and reputation host third-party content and promotions to monetise the platform. However, Google will now take action against such content and will consider it as low-value third-party content.
The search engine giant is going to implement this policy in two months and starting May 5 it will start filtering out the content solely published for monetising.
Google states: “Sometimes, websites that have their own great content may also host low-quality content provided by third parties with the goal of capitalizing on the hosting site's strong reputation. For example, a third party might publish payday loan reviews on a trusted educational website to gain ranking benefits from the site. Such content ranking highly on Search can confuse or mislead visitors who may have vastly different expectations for the content on a given website.”
“We’ll now consider very low-value, third-party content produced primarily for ranking purposes and without close oversight of a website owner to be spam. We're publishing this policy two months in advance of enforcement on May 5, to give site owners time to make any needed changes,” it adds.
Exploitation of Expired Domain
Various website owners purchase additional website domains that are already expired and promote their unoriginal content on those domains. This tricks the users into thinking that the new content is associated with the original website, which may no longer even exist.
Google will now address this misleading practice. It has now classified expired domains repurposed to promote low-quality content as spam.
Comments
All Comments (0)
Join the conversation