GoogleA major search quality update was announced today, designed to improve the quality of search results and punish sites that abuse artificial intelligence and other spam techniques to manipulate search rankings. The move targets sites that create content "for search engines rather than for people," especially those that use automated techniques to mass-produce low-quality content.
According to Google, consumers often encounter these low-quality or spam sites when searching online, and although they rank high in search results, they fail to provide valuable expert reviews or real promotional information. To address this problem, Google has updated its spam policy to address the need to exclude low-quality content from search, such as expired websites being repurposed to publish spam content.
The update will also penalize "website reputation abuse," whereby some websites that originally provide valuable content host third-party low-quality content under their domain names, confusing users and gaining traffic by leveraging the website's existing reputation. Google cited the example of some education websites posting irrelevant loan reviews on their websites just to get higher search rankings.
Google estimates that this and previous efforts will be able to reduce low-quality and unoriginal content by 40%. A spokesperson said the update will "directly address low-quality AI-generated content that is designed to attract clicks but does not add much original value."
The changes will affect pages that impersonate common search queries but provide no real value to users. Independent niche sites recently complained that their expert reviews wereSEOPublishers are seeing a steady decline in website traffic as new companies use AI to aggregate information.
Google will give a two-month transition period before implementing the new policy on May 5. The reform is seen as an important step for Google to cope with the era of artificial intelligence and maintain search quality and user experience.