Faced with the proliferation of mediocre content on the Web, increasingly generated by AI, Google will deploy an update to better filter search results by prioritizing quality. Beautiful promise or real cleaning?
For some time now, more and more users have found that the quality of Google search results is deteriorating. At issue: content without much interest, written in sequence and relying entirely on SEO techniques and tips (Search Engine Optimization, or Search Engine Optimization) to be well referenced in search results. And things are not getting better with the development of AI! Now anyone can ask tools like ChatGPT and Gemini – which ironically is owned by Google – to generate a search engine-optimized article in seconds. Result: we end up with entire sites with content written almost exclusively using AI. And the Internet giant is finding it increasingly difficult to sort…
But Google has decided to tackle the problem head on! Don’t be surprised if the search results you’re used to change over the next few weeks. In a blog post published on March 5, 2024, the company announced a future update intended to optimize its search results for you to see “more useful information, and fewer results that seem designed for search engines”. To do this, it will tackle spam and “his new practices”. Understand: AI-generated content.
Google results: a big kick in the anthill
So, Google counts “refine some of [ses] basic filing systems” in order to better identify web pages that are useless or have been created for search engines rather than for Internet users. For example, “these may be sites created primarily to answer very specific search queries”, explains the company. In its fight against spam, it has also identified several problematic behaviors that it intends to sanction with its next update.
First, Google will target websites that are considered “serious” but host low-quality content provided by a third party, allowing them to quickly and artificially climb up the rankings of search results. Google is giving until May 5 for the sites concerned to correct their behavior. Frequently asked questions are online at this address.
“Today, methods of creating content at scale are more sophisticated, and it is not always clear whether content was created automatically or not”explains Google, citing as an example “sites that claim to provide answers to popular questions, but do not provide useful content”. In short, even if the term is not directly used, we understand by reading between the lines that the company is talking about websites powered by AI. Indeed, since the deployment of ChatGPT and the race for AI that followed, sites created directly using AI have multiplied. She will therefore“focus on this abusive behavior, namely the production of content at scale to improve search engine rankings, whether through automation, humans, or a combination of both”.
Google also plans to tackle the abuse of expired domain names. This practice consists of buying a site in this situation, then using it to distribute content that is useless for the user – who does not necessarily realize that the owner has changed – or even malicious. This helps boost the rankings of sites with poor content. With its update, the Mountain View firm estimates it can reduce the volume of poor content in search results by around 40%. We’ll see if that’s the case!