Another year and another core update from Google to fight spammers, remove low-quality content, and make Search not only insightful but present data in its purest form. These policies are regularly updated to ensure people who visit Google know what they find there is the latest and best.
Let’s dive deep into the recent core updates and their effects on search results:
Spam Policies
Google’s spam policy is designed in such a way that it targets practices that negatively impact Google’s search results. The three updates under spam policies are – expired domain abuse, scaled content abuse, and site reputation abuse. What are they? Let’s explore!
A) Expired Domain Abuse
This simply refers to purchasing a high-authority expired domain name and repurposing it with the sole purpose of manipulating the search ranking or benefiting from Search results.
Note: This is an activity done purposefully and not accidentally. It is usually done to run well in Search with content that is low value but rides on the domain’s past reputation. The idea behind it is to find them only via search engines and not through other means and references.
B) Scaled Content Abuse
Scaled content abuse refers to creating a large number of fake and unhelpful web pages. This tricks search engines into thinking the website is important and relevant to readers, but it is not. The sole thought behind these pages is to rank higher in search results. It’s a sneaky way of looking important to search engines without offering anything valuable to the audience searching for information.
This new rule works as an upgrade based on their old rule on stopping spam on our platform. This upgrades it to tackle and put a stop to spammy and unhelpful content, regardless of how it’s produced—whether it is AI-generated, by people, or both.
C) Site Reputation Abuse
When third-party pages are published independently with little or no involvement with first-party oversight, it is termed site reputation abuse. This is done to take advantage of the first-party site’s search ranking and build a “reputation” for these third-party pages. A few examples of such pages are sponsored pages, advertising or partner pages, or pages that are not in line with the host site and offer little or no insights to the visitor.
With the reformed policy, all third-party content hosted without close oversight or created to manipulate the Search rankings will not be considered. Publications that host advertising content intended for their regular readers and not to exploit the Search rankings will not be under Google’s radar.
Note: To allow time for site owners to prepare for this change, this new policy will take effect starting May 5, 2024.
Recent Impacts Due to this Core Update by Google
This massive update by Google will result in a 60% increase in helpful content presented to its audience. This update has already begun, and a significant round of manual actions has been applied to sites that resulted in them being completely deindexed.
Findings:
- Manual Action Applied to Over 1,446 sites that were on MediaVine, Raptive, or Ezoic
- Of the approx. 79k sites checked, 1.9% of them had a manual action applied to them
- Cumulative traffic loss estimated at over 20 million visitors/month
- 3 Websites with Over 1 million Organic Visitors Per Month to Zero — zacjohnson.com, beingselfish.in, equityatlas.org.
Conclusion
With the ongoing fight for high-quality search results, this Google core update March-24, revamping its spam policies, is a head-on fight with spammers and little or no-value content that users generally face. This will help Google and its users find content that will be helpful by 60%. The impacts have already been experienced, and it is only going to get better from here. It looks like Google has gone all in to tackle the problem of irrelevant and unwanted search results!