Google Targets SEO-Optimized Junk and Spam Pages with New Search Update | Top Vip News

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Google today took aim at the SEO industry, which has gamified search rankings to destroy the value of Google Search results. Often, consumer web searches for product recommendations, reviews, deals and discounts return low-quality or spam websites that don’t offer the expert reviews or helpful promotions they promise, despite their high rankings. That’s about to change with the company’s latest search update, the company said.

On Tuesday Google announced a search quality update which will specifically focus on improving website search quality rankings and update Google Search spam policies. In the case of the latter, Google’s new policies will address the need to keep low-quality content out of search, such as “expired websites repurposed as spam repositories by new owners,” it says, as well as obituary spam. .

Overall, the update aims to improve Google’s ranking systems to lower the rankings of pages that were “created for search engines instead of people,” the company’s announcement explains. That is, sites that have a poor user experience or that were apparently designed to answer a very specific search query will be affected. Google estimates that through this update and its previous efforts, it will be able to reduce unoriginal and low-quality content by 40%.

Although Google’s blog post does not directly mention the term “artificial intelligence” or “AI,” its detailed post on Search Central. The company explains the impact this new technology is having on the web by explaining that content creation methods at scale often take advantage of “automation.” Due to the sophistication of these technologies, it is not always clear if the content is created by humans, if there was automation, or if it is a combination of both.

Instead, Google says it will focus on abusive behavior of creating content at scale to improve search rankings, regardless of how the site was created. This could affect websites that claim to provide answers to popular search queries, but don’t actually provide much value to the end user.

Google tells us the The ranking changes “will directly address low-quality AI-generated content that is designed to attract clicks but doesn’t add much original value,” according to spokesperson Jennifer Kutz. “The updates will also address other types of content: content that may be primarily created by humans but doesn’t add much value for users. The ultimate goal is to reduce the presence of pages that are unsatisfactory and lack original content,” she said. The content abuse policy at scale will focus on content created by humans, generative AI or other automated means, Google said.

Google’s changes will also address “site reputation abuse,” which occurs when a website that normally features valuable content also hosts low-quality content from third parties on its domain, in an effort to confuse users and take advantage of existing reputation of the site. The company offers an example of how an educational website can also include payday loan reviews for ranking benefits, but we could also imagine this will affect the numerous product review sites that apparently no longer conduct real hands-on testing. , they just pretend they do.

This issue was recently raised by 404 media, which was pointed out by recent German research that found Google search quality was objectively getting worse, after analyzing thousands of search terms over the year. Search marketers also agree with this assessment, saying that the scammers were winning. Meanwhile, independent sites that focus on a niche market, like HouseFresh’s air purifier review site, are being hurt by the rise of SEO spam, which is stifling their expert-led product research. humans. HouseFresh wrote “Google is killing independent sites like ours” in a blog post last month, which dove into how product recommendations from big media publishers were outperforming their reviews on Google, even though they didn’t appear to be legitimate editorial reviews.

The update will also address expired domain abuse, which aims to trick consumers into telling them that new content is part of an older site, and when domains are resold and reused to increase low-quality content and spam.

If Google successfully addresses these issues with its search quality update, it could have a significant impact on how consumers perceive the usefulness of Google Search, something that many people are increasingly concerned about in the wake of advances in the AI. Publishers are seeing declining website clicks and startups, like the Arc web browser, and news readers are looking to employ AI to summarize information at the expense of the website traffic that keeps news sites alive. the editors.

Google says it will publish its policy two months before it goes into effect on May 5 to give site owners time to make changes.