Every day, people turn to Search to find the best of what the web has to offer. Google has long had policies and automated systems to fight against spammers, and they work to address emerging tactics that look to game our results with low-quality content.

Earlier this month, Google announced key changes they are making to improve the quality of Search and the helpfulness of results. According to Google, “

• Improved quality ranking: We’re making algorithmic enhancements to our core ranking systems to ensure we surface the most helpful information on the web and reduce unoriginal content in search results.
• New and improved spam policies: We’re updating our spam policies to keep the lowest-quality content out of Search, like expired websites repurposed as spam repositories by new owners and obituary spam.

Reducing low-quality, unoriginal results

In 2022, we began tuning our ranking systems to reduce unhelpful, unoriginal content on Search and keep it at very low levels. We’re bringing what we learned from that work into the March 2024 core update.

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. This could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries.

We believe these updates will reduce the amount of low-quality content on Search and send more traffic to helpful and high-quality sites. Based on our evaluations, we expect that the combination of this update and our previous efforts will collectively reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%.”