Google keeps updating its Algorithms and Software to provide users with the best experience. Every day, people turn to Search to find the best of what the web has to offer. Google had policies and automated systems to fight against spammers and work to address emerging tactics that look to game the results with low-quality content. Google regularly updates its policies and systems to effectively tackle these trends to continue delivering useful content and connecting people with high-quality websites.
Reducing low-quality, unoriginal results
In 2022, Google began tuning the ranking systems to reduce unhelpful, unoriginal content on Search and keep it at very low levels.
This update involves refining some of Google core ranking systems to help 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.
Google 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 evaluations, Google expect that the combination of this update and previous efforts will collectively reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%.
Keeping more spam out of your results
For decades, Google relied on advanced spam-fighting systems and spam policies to prevent the lowest-quality content from appearing in search results — and that work continues.
Google is making several updates to spam policies to better address new and evolving abusive practices that lead to unoriginal, low-quality content showing up on Search. Google take action on more types of these manipulative behaviors While Google ranking systems keep many types of low-quality content from ranking highly on Search, these updates allow Google to take more targeted action under our spam policies.
Scaled content abuse
Google long had a policy against using automation to generate low-quality or unoriginal content at scale with the goal of manipulating search rankings. This policy was originally designed to address instances of content being generated at scale where it was clear that automation was involved.
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, Google is strengthening 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 Google 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.
Site Reputation abuse
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.
Google now consider very low-value, third-party content produced primarily for ranking purposes and without close oversight of a website owner to be spam. Google is publishing this policy two months in advance of enforcement on May 5, to give site owners time to make any needed changes.
Expired domain abuse
Occasionally, expired domains are purchased and repurposed with the primary intention of boosting search ranking of low-quality or unoriginal content. This can mislead users into thinking the new content is part of the older site, which may not be the case. Expired domains that are purchased and repurposed with the intention of boosting the search ranking of low-quality content are now considered spam.
Search helps people with billions of questions every day, but there will always be areas where we can improve. Google continue to work hard at keeping low-quality content on Search to low levels, and showing more information created to help people.
1 Comments