Goodbye spam, hello, better search results.
What You Need To Know
- Improved quality rankings will filter out low-effort results from searches.
- Updated spam policies will continue to combat unhelpful web pages from appearing.
- Low-value, third-party content designed for ranking purposes is now considered spam.
Over 8.5 billion Google searches are made every day, with users looking for comprehensive results that answer their queries. Sometimes, though, those results are unhelpful, unoriginal, and low-quality, leaving users scrambling to find an answer. The good news is that’s all going to change, beginning today with a new comprehensive update to Google Search.
Tuesday’s Google Search update is focused on two key tenets: improved quality ranking and improved spam policies, according to a blog release from Google.
To start, the tech giant is incorporating what it learned in a 2022 effort to combat unoriginal content in search into this new update. By refining its core ranking systems, Google hopes to better understand whether a specific webpage is unhelpful, unfriendly to the user experience, or created solely to manipulate the search engine. The end result is fewer low-quality results per query and more helpful, high-quality results. Google estimates that low-quality results will be reduced by 40%.
Google’s spam policies are receiving an update to better address evolving practices on the part of bad actors. The updates will allow for more targeted actions against such practices, helping users avoid such results entirely. These efforts will combine with Google’s refined efforts against abusive scaled content, or content created en masse with little to no value, like pages purporting to have a specific answer but don’t.
Rounding out the update are two concerted efforts against site reputation and expired domain abuse. In the former, Google is now considering “very low-value, third-party content produced primarily for ranking purposes and without close oversight of a website owner to be spam.” This particular policy is being publicized two months ahead of its official rollout on May 5; that way, site owners can make the appropriate changes before enforcement. In the latter effort, Google is considering expired domains that are bought and repurposed to intentionally boost the ranking of low-quality content as spam, and action will be taken accordingly.
In total, these new efforts and policies will help provide a better user experience across Google Search. Users will see low-effort spam and more high-quality results, which is something worth celebrating.
