Google is taking action against algorithmically generated spam. The search engine giant has just announced upcoming changes, including a new spam policy, designed to keep AI clickbait out of search results.
“It looks like this is going to be one of the biggest updates in Google’s history,” says Lily Ray, senior director of SEO at marketing agency Amsive. “This could change everything.”
In a blog post, Google claims the change will reduce “low-quality, non-genuine content” in search results by 40 percent. It will focus on reducing what the company calls “scaled content abuse,” which occurs when bad actors post mass articles and blog posts on the Internet designed for game search engines. .
“A good example of this, which has been around for a while, is the abuse around death spam,” says Pandu Naik, Google’s vice president of search. Obituary spam is a particularly serious type of digital piracy, where people try to make money by scraping and republishing death notices, sometimes on social platforms like YouTube. Recently, obituary spammers have started using artificial intelligence tools to increase their output, making the problem even worse. Google’s new policy, if effectively implemented, should make it harder for this type of spam to appear in online searches.
This particularly aggressive approach to combating search spam is aimed specifically at “domain squatting”, a practice in which scavengers buy websites with name recognition to leverage their reputation. Often replacing original journalism with AI-generated articles designed to manipulate search engine rankings. This kind of behavior predates the AI boom, but with the rise of text generation tools like ChatGPT, it’s become much easier to generate endless articles to game Google’s rankings.
The rise of domain squatting is just one of the issues that have tarnished Google Search’s reputation in recent years. “People can spin these sites really easily,” says SEO expert Gareth Boyd, who runs digital marketing firm Forte Analytica. “It’s been a big problem.” (Boyd admits he has built similar sites in the past, though he says he no longer does.)
In February, WIRED reported on several AI clickbait networks that used domain squatting as a tactic, including a website that took over defunct indie women’s website The Hairpin and The shuttered Hong Kong-based pro-democracy tabloid took the websites for Apple Daily and filled them with AI. – Born nonsense. Another turned the website of a small-town Iowa newspaper into a dismal repository for AI blog posts on retail stocks. According to Google’s new policy, this type of behavior is now clearly classified as spam by the company.
In addition to domain squatting, Google’s new policy will also focus on eliminating “reputation abuse,” where otherwise trusted websites allow third-party sources to publish sponsored content or other digital junk. Gives (Google’s blog post cites “Payday Loan Reviews on a Trusted Education Website” as an example.) While other parts of the spam policy will begin enforcement immediately, Google’s reputation Giving websites 60 days notice before cracking down on abuse. Time to fall in line.
Nike says the company has been working on this particular update since late last year. More broadly, the company is working on ways to fix low-quality content in search from 2022, including AI-generated spam. “We are aware of the issue,” says Naik. “These changes take time to develop effectively.”
Some SEO experts are cautiously optimistic that these changes could restore Google’s search effectiveness. “Hopefully things will go back to the way they were,” Ray says. “But we’ll have to see what happens.”