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New ways we’re tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search
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Search


NEW WAYS WE’RE TACKLING SPAMMY, LOW-QUALITY CONTENT ON SEARCH

Mar 05, 2024

3 min read

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We’re enhancing Search so you see more useful information, and fewer results
that feel made for search engines.

Elizabeth Tucker
Director, Product Management
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Every day, people turn to Search to find the best of what the web has to offer.
We’ve long had policies and automated systems to fight against spammers, and we
work to address emerging tactics that look to game our results with low-quality
content. We regularly update those policies and systems to effectively tackle
these trends so we can continue delivering useful content and connecting people
with high-quality websites.

Today we’re announcing key changes we’re making to improve the quality of Search
and the helpfulness of your results:

 * Improved quality ranking: We’re making algorithmic enhancements to our core
   ranking systems to ensure we surface the most helpful information on the web
   and reduce unoriginal content in search results.
 * New and improved spam policies: We’re updating our spam policies to keep the
   lowest-quality content out of Search, like expired websites repurposed as
   spam repositories by new owners and obituary spam.


REDUCING LOW-QUALITY, UNORIGINAL RESULTS

In 2022, we began tuning our ranking systems to reduce unhelpful, unoriginal
content on Search and keep it at very low levels. We're bringing what we learned
from that work into the March 2024 core update.

This update involves refining some of our core ranking systems to help us better
understand if webpages are unhelpful, have a poor user experience or feel like
they were created for search engines instead of people. This could include sites
created primarily to match very specific search queries.

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%.

Update April 26, 2024: As of April 19, we’ve completed the rollout of these
changes. You’ll now see 45% less low-quality, unoriginal content in search
results versus the 40% improvement we expected across this work.


KEEPING MORE SPAM OUT OF YOUR RESULTS

For decades, we’ve relied on advanced spam-fighting systems and spam policies to
prevent the lowest-quality content from appearing in search results — and that
work continues.

We’re making several updates to our spam policies to better address new and
evolving abusive practices that lead to unoriginal, low-quality content showing
up on Search. We’ll take action on more types of these manipulative behaviors
starting today. While our ranking systems keep many types of low-quality content
from ranking highly on Search, these updates allow us to take more targeted
action under our spam policies.


SCALED CONTENT ABUSE

We’ve long had a policy against using automation to generate low-quality or
unoriginal content at scale with the goal of manipulating search rankings. This
policy was originally designed to address instances of content being generated
at scale where it was clear that automation was involved.

Today, scaled content creation methods are more sophisticated, and whether
content is created purely through automation isn't always as clear. To better
address these techniques, we’re strengthening our policy to focus on this
abusive behavior — producing content at scale to boost search ranking — whether
automation, humans or a combination are involved. This will allow us to take
action on more types of content with little to no value created at scale, like
pages that pretend to have answers to popular searches but fail to deliver
helpful content.


SITE REPUTATION ABUSE

Sometimes, websites that have their own great content may also host low-quality
content provided by third parties with the goal of capitalizing on the hosting
site's strong reputation. 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.

We’ll now consider very low-value, third-party content produced primarily for
ranking purposes and without close oversight of a website owner to be spam.
We're publishing this policy two months in advance of enforcement on May 5, to
give site owners time to make any needed changes.


EXPIRED DOMAIN ABUSE

Occasionally, expired domains are purchased and repurposed with the primary
intention of boosting search ranking of low-quality or unoriginal content. This
can mislead users into thinking the new content is part of the older site, which
may not be the case. Expired domains that are purchased and repurposed with the
intention of boosting the search ranking of low-quality content are now
considered spam.

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.

POSTED IN:
 * Search

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