Google Hates SEO Spam As Much As You Do
No matter how hard competitors like Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo try, Google is still the king of search. But even royalties have downsides: You may have noticed that Google’s overall search quality has declined in recent years, returning more low-quality posts, gaming the system to reach the top of the results page.
The good news is that Google seems to be tired of SEO spam too. The company announced Tuesday that it is making changes to search in its major March 2024 update to reduce spam messages and provide better, more accurate results for your queries. These changes include updating the algorithm that powers Google’s core ranking systems, as well as improving the company’s spam policy.
First, let’s look at these major ranking systems. Google says that the algorithmic improvements they are implementing will be better able to recognize whether a website is not useful, offers an unpleasant user experience, or seems like it is specifically designed to target key search queries rather than for readers to learn from. including sites created “primarily to match very specific search queries.”
Google believes these changes could potentially reduce the number of spam and low-quality sites you see in any search result by up to 40%. This is good for everyone, except for the sites pumping out this content. Google is also updating its spam policy with three key changes:
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Expired domain abuse . This tactic involves taking over an expired website and using its previous readership and authority to host your low-quality content. One of Google’s examples is “casino-related content on the site of a former elementary school.” So, you know, don’t do it.
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Massive Content Abuse : Looks for sites that pump out large amounts of low quality content to gain search rankings. Google prohibits this practice, whether it is pages created by artificial intelligence, a site scraping the Internet to create content, or publishing irrelevant junk that is riddled with search keywords.
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Abuse of the site’s reputation . This occurs when a high-quality site hosts low-quality pages from third parties in order to boost the reputation of these low-quality posts based on the reputation of the main site. I’m guessing this happens more often than you think since it’s the only policy change Google hasn’t implemented yet. Instead, the company is giving site owners until May 5 to clean up their act.
Hopefully these new changes will reduce the amount of BS and help restore some of the quality of Google’s once trusty search experience. Of course, this won’t solve all of Google’s problems, and anyone who is primarily concerned about privacy won’t give up on DuckDuckGo or Startpage , but an end to the spam and low-quality content that plagues the search engine most of us use is welcome. development, especially as AI-generated content continues to grow.