New Algorithm, Google Removes Spam Sites from Search Lists
Morrissey Technology – Google launched an update that resulted in a new Search Engine Optimization (SEO) system and displaced spam sites from search results. Google’s move targets the SEO industry, which has damaged the quality of searches on Google Search. The reason is that consumer web searches for product recommendations, reviews, deals, and discounts produce low-quality or spam websites that do not provide the expert reviews or promotions they promise, even though they rank high in search listings. Google says this will change with their latest search system update.
On Tuesday (5/3), Google announced a search quality update that will specifically focus on improving website search quality rankings and will update Google Search spam policies.
As such, Google’s new policy will accommodate the need to evict low-quality content from search, such as outdated websites that are repurposed as spam repositories by new owners, as well as obituary spam.
“We are making algorithmic improvements to our core ranking system to ensure that we display the most useful information on the web and reduce unoriginal content in search results,” Google wrote on its page.
“We updated our spam policy to prevent low-quality content from Search, such as outdated websites that are repurposed as spam repositories by new owners and obituary spam,” he added.
Overall, the update aims to improve Google’s ranking system to downgrade pages that are “built for search engines, not humans.”
This means that sites that have a poor user experience or that appear to be designed to match very specific search queries will be impacted.
According to Tech Crunch, Google estimates that this update and a number of previous efforts will reduce low-quality and unoriginal content by up to 40 percent. Although Google’s blog page does not mention the term “artificial intelligence” or “AI” directly in this latest system update, a detailed post on Search Central does.
The company explained the impact of this new technology on the web by explaining that large-scale content creation methods often leverage automation. Due to the sophistication of this technology, it is not always clear whether the content was created by humans, whether automation was involved, or a combination of both.
Therefore, Google will focus on abusive behavior in large-scale content creation to improve search rankings, regardless of how the site is created. This can impact web pages that pretend to offer answers to popular search queries, but don’t actually provide much benefit to users. According to spokesperson Jennifer Kutz, these ranking changes will directly address low-quality AI-generated content that is designed to attract clicks, but does not provide much original value.
“This update will also address other types of content – content that may be human-generated but doesn’t provide much value to users. The main goal is to reduce the presence of pages that feel unsatisfactory, and lack original content,” he said.
As such, this content abuse policy will focus on content created by humans, generative AI FOR4D, or other automated means. Google’s update will also resolve the issue of site reputation abuse, which is when a website that normally displays good content, but also hosts low-quality content from third parties on their domain, in an attempt to confuse users and take advantage of the site’s existing reputation.
The company provides an example of how an educational website might also include payday loan reviews to gain ranking benefits, but we can also imagine this having an impact on many product review sites that apparently no longer do real hands-on testing, and only pretend to do so.
Furthermore, if Google successfully addresses its search quality issues, this could have a significant impact on how consumers perceive the usability of Google Search, which many people are increasingly concerned about in the wake of advances in AI. Google said they published their policy two months before its implementation, namely on May 5 2024. This time is given for site owners to make changes.