Google announced a major update on March 5, 2024. The changes are aimed at improving the quality of the search and combating low-quality content and spam in particular.
Determining the usefulness of content
Google’s statement refers to the improvement of ranking algorithms. Algorithms will use innovative signals and approaches to show more useful results.
The company emphasizes that this is a complex update. Deployment can take up to a month with rating fluctuations.
Webmasters are advised to focus their efforts on creating high-quality and truly useful content for users. Google specialists expect a reduction of low-quality and unoriginal content in search results by 40%.
Spam policy update
The second part of the changes concerns the spam policy, which includes both an update of the entire section and 3 additional points:
Domain abuse and expiration. This is a common practice in some industries of buying an authoritative domain and repurposing it for other purposes. For example, buying a domain that was previously used by a medical site to host low-quality casino-related content. Mass abuse of content – generating large numbers of pages to manipulate search engine rankings. Abusing the reputation of the site – mass placement of backlinks that do not correspond to the topic of the site on which they are placed. The new policy does not consider all third-party content as a violation, but only that which is intended to manipulate the rating.
Google will notify you through the dashboard when work on the current update is complete.
