On March 5, 2024, Google announced its first core update of the year: an update to its search results that prioritizes helpful information.
In a blog post, Google said the update's key changes include algorithmic enhancements to the core ranking systems to help prioritize the most helpful information on the Internet and reduce unoriginal content. New spam policies will also help keep low-quality content out of the search results.
To reduce low-quality search results, Google explained that the update will refine some core ranking systems to understand better if webpages are unhelpful, have poor user experience, or were created for search engines instead of people. Google states that this update will help reduce low-quality search results by 40%.
Google states:
“We believe these updates will reduce the amount of low-quality content on Search and send more traffic to helpful and high-quality sites. Based on our evaluations, we expect that the combination of this update and our previous efforts will collectively reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%.”
The spam policy updates include a better assessment of the evolving content practices that lead to unoriginal, low-quality content. The hope is that the new spam policies will detect content created at scale, whether made by automation or humans, to improve search ranking. This type of manipulation tactic produces content with little value and fails to produce a helpful answer.
Additionally, Google will now consider low-value, third-party content as spam. Google provides an example of third-party content:
“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.”
This new policy will be enacted on May 5, 2024, to give site owners time to address these issues.
Lastly, Google plans to address expired domain abuse, a tactic where expired domains are purchased and repurposed to boost the search ranking of low-quality content.
Google emphasizes its commitment to search in a closing statement:
“Search helps people with billions of questions every day, but there will always be areas where we can improve. We’ll continue to work hard at keeping low-quality content on Search to low levels, and showing more information created to help people.”
