Google starts reducing “unhelpful” content by 40%

Google has announced the latest core update, tackling low-quality content and introducing new spam policies targeting search ranking manipulation techniques.

The March 2024 Core Update is more extensive than Google’s usual core updates. The update involves algorithm updates to improve search result quality.

New Spam Policies

With the new update, Google has also introduced new spam policies including targeting scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse and expired domain abuse.

Scaled content abuse

Google is clamping down on websites that are using automation to generate low-quality content or content that is not original to reduce the amount of content generated by platforms like ChatGPT to manipulate search rankings.

Site reputation abuse

Many trusted websites host low-quality and third-party content to capitalise on the hosting sites’ strong reputation, Google started becoming more stringent with websites that are doing this a few months ago, however, with the latest update they are stressing the importance of this, and integrating more measures into the Core Update to target websites doing this.

Expired domain abuse

A well-known tactic which has been used for many years is for websites to purchase additional domains that have expired and have been previously used and repurpose these to boost search rankings. The practice can mislead users into thinking content is part of the older, trusted site. Google has announced that they are going to be clamping down on this practice.

When will this update be released?

Google has started to roll out the new update, which is expected to take around a month to roll out fully. Websites have two months to comply with the new site reputation policy.

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