Almost all of us use Google search every day in the hope of finding quality, relevant content quickly and easily. We are users who are satisfied or, more often than not, disappointed by the results. Many of us are content creators ourselves, publishing professional or entertainment, insightful and scholarly texts on a variety of platforms. We are authors who increasingly use AI tools, as speed and efficiency add to the pressures not only on communication professionals. At the end of the day, when we are browsing in search, we feel unhappy not to have found relevant, high-quality content that is drowned out by a bland set of words that reverberates through Google’s algorithm.
The good news is that Google is taking proactive steps to announce the major changes it is making to improve the quality of search and the usefulness of results.
Improved Quality Ranking: Algorithmic improvements are being made to key ranking systems. The aim is to ensure that the most useful information is ‘caught’ and brought to the surface, and that the amount of non-original content in search is significantly reduced.
Newly improved spam policy: Google is updating its spam policy to prevent searches from including low-quality content, such as websites that have expired.
Google will reduce the number of low-quality, non-original results
As early as 2022, Google has started to align its ranking systems to reduce the amount of useless, unoriginal content in search. Lessons learned are being implemented in a major, overarching update due in March 2024. Improvements to ranking systems will seek to identify sites that are useless, have a poor user experience, in other words, were designed for search engines, not people. This may include sites that were primarily designed to meet very specific search queries. Google hopes that these updates will reduce the amount of low-quality content in search and drive more traffic to useful and high-quality websites. Based on its own estimates, Google projects that the combination of this update and previous efforts will cumulatively reduce the amount of low-quality, non-original content in search results by 40%.
Spam must not be present in users’ search results
Google says it has relied for decades on advanced anti-spam systems to keep the lowest quality content out of search results. Abusive practices are evolving, and Google is catching up and striving to respond effectively. In a newly released statement, Google pledges to take action to tackle a wide range of such manipulative behavior. It is to be hoped that the results of the fight against spam will indeed prevent low-quality content from ranking high in searches.
Abuse of content scale
Google has previously had measures in place to prohibit the use of automation to create low-quality or unoriginal content on a large scale to manipulate search rankings. This policy was designed to address cases where content is generated on a large scale and where it was clear that automation was involved.
Today, content creation methods are more sophisticated and it is not always clear whether content is being created only by automation. In any case, Google is toughening its stance and taking action against abuse – the large-scale creation of content to boost search rankings, whether automation, people or a combination of both. For example, if pages are created on a large scale pretending to answer popular searches without providing useful content, Google’s search engine should recognise them and not rank them or take other measures.
Abuse of the site’s reputation
An important change for both website owners and third parties hosting content on pages outside their control. Sometimes sites that have excellent content themselves may also host low-quality content provided by third parties in order to take advantage of a good hosting site reputation. For example, a third party may post payday loan reviews on a reputable educational institution’s website to benefit from the site’s ranking. Such content, which ranks highly in a search engine, may mislead visitors who may have very different expectations of the content of a particular website.
Google will now treat such low-value third-party content produced for ranking purposes as spam, especially if it is distributed without the strict supervision of the website owner. The implementation of this tightening is two months away from 5 May. This is sufficient time for website owners to make the necessary changes.
Abuse of an expired domain
Expired domains are sometimes acquired and resold to improve the search rankings of low-quality or unoriginal content. This can be misleading for users, who may expect to find new content as part of an older website. Expired domains that are acquired and resold to boost the search rankings of low-quality content are now considered as spam by Google’s search engine, with the corresponding consequences.
Google’s search engine is trusted by billions of people around the world. It is worth applauding the efforts that are being made to generate and disseminate quality, original content.
Google’s changes benefit effective websites with quality content
We welcome the changes, which we have no doubt will help brands to communicate in a way that is knowledge-based, with a genuine desire to inform and educate audiences, and that creates value for content consumers. Our team has consistently been committed to combining the technical and technological principles of website design and further development with the generation of original, quality content. Each brand is unique, as is the company that develops it, so interesting, valuable information is available, it is just a matter of consistently and responsibly gathering and accumulating expert knowledge, presenting it in a style and means that is consistent with the brand’s values, analyzing the target audience’s demand and feedback, monitoring the results of engagement with the content and the impact on business results.
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Information is based on Google releases.