Google Search receives a robust update that fights spam

What do you want to know

• Improved quality rankings will filter search results requiring little effort.
• Updated anti-spam policies will continue to prevent unnecessary web pages from appearing.
• Low-value third-party content designed for ranking purposes is now considered spam.

More than 8.5 billion Google searches are performed every day, with users searching for comprehensive results that answer their queries. Sometimes, however, these results are useless, unoriginal, and low quality, leaving users scrambling to find an answer. The good news is that everything will change, starting today with a new comprehensive Google Search update.

Tuesday’s Google Search update focuses on two key principles: improved quality rankings and improved anti-spam policies, according to a Google blog release.

For starters, the tech giant is incorporating into this new update what it learned as part of a 2022 effort to combat sought-after unoriginal content. By refining its core ranking systems, Google hopes to better understand whether a specific web page is useless, unfriendly to the user experience, or created solely to manipulate the search engine. The end result is fewer low-quality results per query and more useful, high-quality results. Google estimates that low-quality results will be reduced by 40%.

Google’s anti-spam policies are being updated to better respond to the evolving practices of malicious actors. The updates will enable more targeted actions against such practices, helping users avoid such outcomes altogether. These efforts will be combined with Google’s refined efforts against abusive or mass-created content with little or no value, such as pages claiming to have a specific answer but don’t.

The update is complemented by two concerted efforts against the site’s reputation and the abuse of expired domains. In the first case, Google now considers “very low-value third-party content produced primarily for ranking purposes and without close oversight of the website owner” to be spam. This particular policy is made public two months before its official deployment on May 5; this way, site owners can make appropriate changes before the law is enforced. In this latest effort, Google is considering expired domains that are purchased and repurposed to intentionally improve the ranking of low-quality content as spam, and action will be taken accordingly.

Overall, these new efforts and rules will help provide a better user experience in Google Search. Users will see effortless spam and higher quality results, which is worth celebrating.