Doubling down on helpful content
The main aim from Google’s perspective is to once and for all get rid of what it considers ‘unhelpful’ content. To give you a quick refresher about what is considered helpful content, check out my previous blog on the helpful content update. Elizabeth Tucker, Director of Product, Search at Google, has stated the following regarding the effect of their latest update:
“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%”
So there you have it! A 40% reduction of spammy sites in the search results. As a user, I think this is going to be a fantastic improvement for my search experience. As a marketing professional though, I do wonder if some of the website Google deems unworthy, are going to be neutralized unjustly. There’s really only one thing that we all can do to protect our sites from tanking: double down on optimizing your content, making it user-centred, intent based, and by simply having your experts provide them with high-quality answers to their most burning questions.
Coming down on spammy content and domains
With the advent of Generative AI and conversational AI interfaces like ChatGPT, came (understandably) a huge influx of new content on the web. Huge websites, fighting for authority in the search engines, but producing a massive amount of low-quality, mostly auto-generated articles. This has resulted in Google search’s steadily declining SERP-quality. Something that, I might add, is not only bad for users, but also for SEO marketers that are trying to get their website into the top of the SERPs. Up until this point, it kept feeling more and more like we were fighting a losing battle against spammy content. Well, not anymore!
With the March 2024 Core Update, Google aims to tackle websites that have been (and are) adding new, low-quality content by the boatload. Google now states that this practice is against their guidelines, and they will start neutralizing accordingly. This also includes some of the more creative ways of link building, like buying expired domains, and using the residual authority to bolster your backlink profile.