Google today took aim at the SEO industry which has gamified search rankings to destroy the value of Google Search results. Often, consumers’ web searches for product recommendations, reviews, deals, and discounts, return low-quality or spammy websites that don’t deliver the expert reviews or useful promotions they promise, despite their high ranking. That’s about to change with the company’s latest search update, the comapny said.
On Tuesday, Google announced a search quality update that will specifically focus on improving the search quality ranking of websites and will update Google Search’s spam policies. In the case of the latter, Google’s new policies will address the need to keep low-quality content out of search, like “expired websites repurposed as spam repositories by new owners,” it says, as well as obituary spam.
Overall, the update intends to improve Google’s ranking systems to downrank pages that were “created for search engines instead of for people,” the company’s announcement explains. That is, sites that have a poor user experience or that were seemingly designed to match a very specific search query will be impacted. Google estimates that through this update and its prior efforts, it will be able to reduce low-quality and unoriginal content by 40%.
Although Google’s blog post fails to mention the term “artificial intelligence” or “AI” directly, its detailed post on Search Central does. The company explains the impact this new technology is having on the web, by explaining that scaled content creation methods often leverage “automation.” Because of the sophistication of these technologies, it’s not always clear if content is human-created, if automation was involved, or if it’s a combination of the two.
Google’s changes will also address “site reputation abuse,” which is when a website that typically features valuable content also hosts low-quality content from third parties on their domain, in an effort to confuse users and lean on the site’s existing reputation. The company offers an example of how an educational website may also include payday loan reviews to gain ranking benefits, but we could also imagine this impacting the numerous product review sites that seemingly no longer do real hands-on testing, just pretend that they do.
If Google could address these problems with its search quality update, it could have a significant impact on how consumers perceive the usefulness of Google Search, which many people have become increasingly concerned about in the wake of AI advances. Publishers are seeing diminishing clicks to websites and new startups, like Arc’s web browser and news readers are looking to employ AI to summarize information at the expense of website traffic that keeps publishers’ sites alive.
Google says it’s publishing its policy two months in advance of enforcement on May 5 to give site owners time to make changes.
