Is it just us, or has Google Search been slacking lately? Its usefulness is waning and we think it may have something to do with this AI-ridden era of the internet. “…Spammy, low-quality content,” as Google calls it, is plugging up Search and taking the spotlight off the ‘useful’ results. Google wants to do something about it. The search giant just announced “key changes” to “improve the quality of Search and the helpfulness of your results.”
Room for refining
One of the ways it’ll be doing so is by “refining some of [its] core ranking systems” to get a better sense of when web pages feature poor user experiences, downright unhelpful, or “feel like they were created for search engines instead of people.” The big idea here is for Search to sift through the nonsense, bringing the most helpful information to the surface, simultaneously burying unoriginal and unhelpful content.
It’s specifically looking to clear out those results designed to game the SEO (search engine optimisation) at scale — especially where automation might be involved. “This could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries,” it said.
“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%,” the king of Search said.
Google’s announcement may not mention generative AI specifically, but it is a concern that’s being addressed, according to a Google spokesperson speaking with Gizmodo. The changes target “low-quality AI-generated content that’s designed to attract clicks, but that doesn’t add much original value.”
Google reckons it’s dealing with a “more complex” update than usual and changes could take up to a month to begin rolling out.
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Spammers Paradise no more
Another change tackles spam, with more content being considered worthy of being on that list. It’s updating its spam policies to “better address new and evolving abusive practices that lead to unoriginal, low-quality content showing up on Search,” starting today.
“Today, scaled content creation methods are more sophisticated, and whether content is created purely through automation isn’t always as clear,” it said. “…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. 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.”
Part of those changes involves stemming the flow of low-quality third-party intent on “capitalizing on the hosting site’s strong reputation” that might usually contain “great content.” Google mentions how a third-party producer might publish a payday loan review article on a trusted education website to “gain ranking benefits from the site.”
Starting 5 May, Google will consider this sort of result ‘spam’ and it’s giving affected sites time to make changes.