Google released a core search engine update in March 2024 and part of that update is to focus on a high-quality content. They predict that they will reduce search results of a low quality by up to 40% with this new algorithm update.
Now you can join the dots here to see what kind of low-quality content they mean. Without saying it, it’s implied that AI-generated bland unhelpful content will be the first to go. So if your website is predominantly low quality content that doesn’t actually answer searchers’ questions or provide meaningful information using Google’s EEAT formula, then your SEO efforts will be a waste of time, and you won’t rank.
‘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.
This is what Google said about automated content:
… 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.’
It’s not just your own content that will be reviewed and scrutinised but if you host third party guest posts or similar, that will also be taken into account. And you can’t afford to have even one poor piece of content on your site. You have until 5 May 2024 to change this. Take this opportunity to do a content audit of your site.
‘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,’ Google stated.
As I repeat multiple times, the only way you can win with content when it comes to improving your Google ranking is by writing extremely well-written and high-quality content.
Important to note:
Google says ‘Expired domains that are purchased and repurposed with the intention of boosting the search ranking of low-quality content are now considered spam.’