Recently, Google announced that it would be enhancing its Search algorithms and updating its spamming policies, two things that could impact SEO professionals as they work to ensure that meaningful, organic site content reaches Google users. Specifically, Google is making “key changes” like “improved quality ranking” and “new and improved spam policies. Let’s talk about it.
Google has been tuning its ranking systems since at least 2022 to reduce low-quality content on Google Search. This latest update is meant to help Google better understand whether a webpage’s content is meant to be helpful, or simply meant to rank for a specific search query.
SEO professionals should assess their current content strategies and ensure that they are recommending and/or implementing content that offers unique and valuable information to users. Quality over quantity is the name of the game here.
Though Google’s announcement doesn’t actually mention “artificial intelligence,” its section on “scaled content abuse” will certainly impact those who try to use AI to create mass amounts of content of little value. The company says it will take action against sites publishing low-quality content at scale.
If you’re using automated content to pad a site with lots of blog posts and text, consider whether you’re adding anything of value to users who may come across it. Artificial Intelligence is a powerful tool, but abuse of AI and other scaled content creation techniques could lead to Google taking action. Again, quality trumps quantity.
Using a trusted site to publish low-quality, third-party content, or purchasing an expired domain to publish unoriginal content, is not allowed by Google. Both practices are considered an abuse of the trusted site’s high reputation and will now be considered spam.
If you are an SEO professional, make sure you are following ethical best practices and are not trying to deceive users. It’s one thing to collaborate with trusted websites in good faith, but attempting to trick users into thinking your content belongs to a more trusted source is never a good idea.
Wondering what happens when Google “takes action” against a website? A lot of the time, Google’s algorithms will automatically exclude spammy content from search results, but sometimes, pages are reviewed manually. When a human reviewer at Google reviews a site’s pages and determines that they are not compliant with Google’s spam policies, the reviewer can issue a manual action.
In order to remove a manual action, you have to fix the issue that has been flagged, and then request another review. These reviews can take a few days or even weeks, so the best advice we can give you is to ensure that your SEO practices are compliant before you can get flagged by Google!
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