A hot potato: While we wait for the global revolution that AI algorithms will surely bring, Google is trying to survive the incoming spam-apocalypse enabled by automatic content generation at scale. The company is seemingly improving web search with more stringent rules against meaningless web pages, but their track record for the past few years is far from positive.

Chatbots and generative AI services have brought an undeniable revolution to the content business, and traditional search engines are poised to suffer the consequences. Machine learning and trained AI algorithms can potentially generate an infinite amount of fake blog posts, articles, and reviews with very little aid from human writers (or real value), and Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are now showing lower-quality results to users.

The situation is only getting worse, but Google says it’s willing to fight against spammers. The company has announced the “March 2024 core” update for its search service, with significant changes designed to improve the quality of search results. Key changes of the update include “algorithmic enhancements” to Google’s ranking systems to improve SERP quality and new spam policies designed to keep the lowest-quality content “out of search.”

The fight against “unhelpful, unoriginal” content on Google’s search began in 2022, the company says, and this latest update builds on what the company learned in the past two years. However, ask independent website owners who work on publishing high-quality content and niche websites that cater to real users and the impression is hardly other than Google has been benefitting big publishers even when they offer sub-par content, sometimes even AI-generated one…

The Helpful Content Update didn’t stop spammers & folks just in it for the money. They long since moved on to new domains, parasite SEO, Reddit spam, etc.

The only site owners Google is punishing – and pushing out of the web ecosystem – are the ones that actually care & try �* https://t.co/12dV1XLZAH

– Nate Hake (@natejhake) February 27, 2024

According to Google, the Core ranking algorithms have been refined to penalize poor user experience or websites that “feel” like they have been created to be consumed by search engines instead of people. With it, Google engineers “expect” to reduce low-quality content in search results by 40 percent. Spam filters and policies are being updated as well, so that the tech can better address “new and evolving abusive practices” that are filling SERP with unoriginal content.

Like many other tech companies that built empires on user-generated content, Google is now trying to put AI at the center of every new service and business venture. And yet, the Mountain View corporation is trying very hard to explain how it will fight search spam without providing any single mention of AI algorithms — which are now routinely abused to generate content farms and meaningless web pages. Case in point, Google was recently caught paying local news sites to beta test and create AI-generated articles using an algorithm they provided.

Google’s updated spam policies are seemingly better prepared to tackle “abusive practices” and the company will say will take action against manipulative behavior, such as content generation at scale. Google will also penalize site reputation abuse practices, like websites that previously published “great content” that try to appear higher in SERP pages by hosting additional, often unrelated SEO-optimized rubbish.

Site owners involved in this kind of practice have until May 5 to change or remove that content; otherwise, Google says it will take action. The company will also penalize attempts to abuse expired domains, marking as spam long-gone websites that resurface under new management only to spread low-quality content in Search.