Big Google Search update aims to show more genuine, ‘helpful’ content

Google announced two sets of updates to Search that are intended to surface more helpful content, while marking more things as spam. 

Google is “refining” its core ranking systems to better determine “if webpages are unhelpful, have a poor user experience or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people.” 

That is often referred to as search engine optimized (SEO) content, which can be overly long, wordy, and might not actually convey anything beyond looking good to Google’s algorithms. The concern is that large language models and generative AI will supercharge this problem. “[S]ites created primarily to match very specific search queries” are cited by Google.

This update is meant to reduce how much “low-quality, unoriginal content” appears in Search by an estimated 40%, per Google’s evaluations, while sending “more traffic to helpful and high-quality sites.” 

Google says this March 2024 update will be “more complex” than usual core updates as it makes changes to multiple key systems. The “rollout may take up to a month.”

…we have enhanced our core ranking systems to show more helpful results using a variety of innovative signals and approaches. There’s no longer one signal or system used to do this, and we’ve also added a new FAQ page to help explain this change.

Meanwhile, Google will classify more things as spam. An updated scaled content abuse policy will see Google “take action on more types of content with little to no value created at scale, like pages that pretend to have answers to popular searches but fail to deliver helpful content.”

To better address these techniques, we’re strengthening our policy to focus on this abusive behavior — producing content at scale to boost search ranking — whether automation, humans or a combination are involved.

Google is going after websites that may have “great content” but host “low-quality content provided by third parties with the goal of capitalizing on the hosting site’s strong reputation.” This practice will be considered spam, with enforcement starting on May 5 to let sites make changes.

For example, a third party might publish payday loan reviews on a trusted educational website to gain ranking benefits from the site. Such content ranking highly on Search can confuse or mislead visitors who may have vastly different expectations for the content on a given website.

Finally, Search will consider “expired domains that are purchased and repurposed with the intention of boosting the search ranking of low-quality content” to be spam.