Google revamps its Search algorithm to reduce low-quality content by 40 percent

Google is making some quality changes to make Google Search results more relevant and to get rid of low-quality content optimized to appear high on search rankings.

This comes as part of Google’s ongoing effort to combat spam and ensure helpful, reliable information is ranked higher.

As part of the changes, Google says that it is making ‘algorithmic enhancements’ to its core ranking systems, paired with new and improved spam policies to keep low-quality content, like expired websites repurposed as spam repositories, and obituary spam, out of search results.

“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,” wrote Google. With the update, Google expects to reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by roughly 40 percent.

This will also prevent content produced at scale (AI-generated or human-generated) with the goal of manipulating search ranking from appearing higher up in search results. This could include pages that claim to have answers to popular searches but fail to deliver, or pages that use expired domains to host spam content. The new spam policies will also tackle the issue of site reputation abuse, where low-quality content from third parties is hosted on reputable websites to rank higher.

Check out a thorough breakdown of the steps Google is taking to make search results more relevant and useful to users here.

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Source: Google