Kate Mills 
Mar 06, 2024
Search engine giant Google is reportedly going to release two major updates to its Google Search, a separate app operated by Google to facilitate users with browsing from the home screen of their smartphones.
The central aspect that has specifically been looked after for the betterment of the updates is the retrieval of content prompted by users, meaning that Google Search will now bring more helpful content upon searching and mark less relevant ones as spam.
Search engine optimised content to be ranked better
The search engine giant is “refining” its core ranking systems to identify in a better way “if webpages are unhelpful, have a poor user experience or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people.”
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Such content is commonly referred to as search engine optimised (SEO) content, which likely has nothing to do beyond seeming good to Google's algorithm as its often longer than the content which genuinely caters to what the user is looking for.
The company is addressing content optimisation in wake of the possibility of it getting worsened by a push from generative AI and large language models. “[S]ites created primarily to match very specific search queries” are cited by Google.
On top of it, the updates are primarily aiming to send more “more traffic to helpful and high-quality sites,” while reducing the amount of "low-quality, unoriginal content" whose fetching proportioning is around 40% as of now.
While the release “may take up to a month,” the company says that tweaking various core systems is what sets this update apart from the rest.
An updated policy regarding the content abuse will ensure that Google “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.”
“Expired domains that are purchased and repurposed with the intention of boosting the search ranking of low-quality content” will be taken as spam.
