New Google update to combat AI content that may affect all businesses

Article sourced from South Australian Business Chamber Member: Online Path

As part of the never-ending work made by Google to present high-quality and useful search results, the company continuously releases changes in policies and systems. Those changes are modified from time to time depending on the specific challenges faced by the company and its users, and lately, the headache for the company hasn’t been other than AI-generated content. That is why this is probably their main focus of the first core update of 2024 made on the 5th of March, which is claimed to reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%.

Why is AI-generated content a problem?

The first thing we need to understand is that this practice is problematic for both users and Google. Despite being a convenient and useful tool for content creation purposes, the AI-generated content, as well as other practices considered to be spam by Google, has caused a major disruption in search results by making low-quality websites reach high positions with misleading information. It is the result of those contents being created with the specific objective of over-performing on the quality ranking, but leaving behind the actual aim of providing useful and high-quality content that responds to users’ searches.

In response, Google has been working on those issues since 2022 when they began ​“tuning ranking systems to reduce unhelpful, unoriginal content”. They expect that the algorithmic enhancements to their core ranking systems as well as the new and improved spam policies, will help them to have a meaningful impact on the negatively affected quality of results they identified on its search engine. The main targets for this update will be websites with lots of AI-generated content, ones with poor user experience, and those that pretend to have answers to popular searches but fail to deliver helpful content.

How do I know if my website will be affected?

Despite being very clear that their goal is to identify and penalise websites with low-quality content that go against Google’s guidelines, the reality is that the changes might affect a big proportion of the current sites on the Internet. Part of the new policies were focused on three specific cases that now will be considered to be spam starting from May 5th and will be directly affected by the Google March 2024 Core Update:

1. Scaled content abuse: This consists of using automation to generate low-quality or unoriginal content at scale to manipulate search rankings. Most AI-generated content falls into this category and new policies will focus on this abusive behaviour, regardless of whether automation, humans, or a combination of both are involved.
2. Expired domain abuse: It is the practice of buying expired domains and repurposing them to boost the search for low-quality content. That could mislead users into thinking that the content is part of the previously trusted site.
3. Site reputation abuse (aka Parasite SEO): In this case, trusted websites host low-quality, third-party content to capitalise on the hosting site’s strong reputation.

To read the full article written by South Australian Business Member and Digital Marketing experts Online Path, click the link here.