what you need to know
- Improving your quality ranking will filter out inefficient results from your searches.
- Updated spam policies will continue to block unwanted web pages.
- Low-value third-party content designed for ranking purposes is now considered spam.
With more than 8.5 billion Google searches every day, users are looking for comprehensive results that answer their queries. But sometimes, these results are useless, unoriginal, and low-quality, leaving users scrambling for answers. The good news is, starting today, that changes with a comprehensive update to Google Search.
Tuesday’s Google Search update focuses on two key principles: improving quality rankings and improving spam policies, according to a blog posted by Google.
First, the tech giant is incorporating lessons learned from its 2022 efforts to crack down on non-original content in search into this new update. By refining its core ranking system, Google hopes to better understand whether specific web pages are unhelpful, user-unfriendly, or simply created to manipulate search engines. The end result is fewer low-quality results per query and more useful, high-quality results. Google expects a 40% reduction in low-quality results.
Google’s spam policies are being updated to better address the changing practices of bad actors. These updates will allow for more targeted actions against this type of behavior, helping users avoid such outcomes entirely. These efforts will be combined with Google’s more granular efforts to target abusive scale content or content created collectively that has little value (such as claiming to have a specific answer but actually not).
Rounding out the update are two joint efforts targeting website reputation and expired domain abuse. Regarding the former, Google now considers “very low-value third-party content produced primarily for ranking purposes and without close oversight by the site owner as spam.” This particular policy was announced two months before its official launch on May 5; this allowed site owners to make appropriate changes before enforcing it. In this latter effort, Google is considering purchasing and repurposing expired domain names to intentionally increase the ranking of low-quality content as spam, and will act accordingly.
Overall, these new efforts and policies will help provide a better user experience on Google Search. Users will see less spam effort and higher quality results, which is something to celebrate.