Google has introduced updates aimed at improving the quality and relevance of its search results. Among those updates are algorithmic improvements to its core ranking systems, designed to prioritize the appearance of the most useful information available online while reducing the presence of unoriginal content.
In addition, Google is revising its spam policy to more effectively exclude low-quality content from its search results. The updated policies target certain types of spam, including expired websites that have been repurposed for spam, as well as obituary spam.
These measures are part of Google’s broader strategy to maintain the integrity of its search results and protect users from irrelevant or malicious content, thereby improving the overall user experience on the platform.
“This update includes refining some of our core ranking systems to better understand if websites are useless, have a poor user experience, or appear to be built for search engines instead of people. This could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries,” wrote Elizabeth Tucker, director of product management for Google, in blog post. “We believe these updates will reduce the amount of low-quality content on Search and send more traffic to useful, high-quality pages. Based on our estimates, we expect that the combination of this update and our previous efforts will together reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%.”
Google is improving its policy to tackle malicious content creation practices that aim to manipulate search rankings through the production of scaled content, whether generated by automation, humans or a combination of the two.
This update aims to target and mitigate the impact of mass-generated low-value content, such as web pages that appear to provide answers to common searches but ultimately offer no useful information. This initiative reflects Google’s commitment to improving the quality of content that appears in its search engine, ensuring that users receive relevant and valuable information, according to Google.