In the age of artificial intelligence, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find content written by actual humans. Hundreds of sites consisting of AI-generated spam have been crowding Google’s search results pages, driving them to make serious changes in their policies and algorithms.
Kicking Spam Out of Your Search Results
In rolling out their March 2024 Core Update, Google has announced new changes to their spam policies and quality rankings. They will be tackling content that has been primarily created for higher search rankings rather than to genuinely assist or educate readers. This update will help assure that low-quality spam content is unable to rank highly; improving search results relating to education, shopping, entertainment, and arts.
Google has held policies against using automation to create unoriginal content for a while now, as many sites will go to great lengths to manipulate their search rankings. Originally designed to penalize instances of large-scale automatically generated content, Google’s past policies have become out of date when stacked up against modern, sophisticated AI generation. To fix this issue, policies have been strengthened to address content manufactured at scale purely for search ranking boosts. This allows Google to take action against a larger variety of content that holds little to no value. Gone are the days of pages feigning answers to common searches while failing to actually provide helpful information.
Deindexing Digital Debris
Following the implementation of this update, Google has deindexed hundreds of websites. A study conducted by Originality.AI found that all deindexed sites had signs of AI-generated content, with half of them having 90-100% AI-generated posts. Though it’s too early to say whether these pages will remain deindexed, the current consequences are severe for affected sites. A monthly loss of $446,552 display ad revenue is estimated across the websites removed from Google’s search index. If that isn’t enough of a deterrent, the vast majority of organic search visits to these sites will be lost.
The actions taken against these websites is a testament to Google’s commitment to countering the rise in low-quality content and AI-generated spam. The complete effects of the March 2024 Core Update will unfold in greater detail as it progresses over the next few weeks, but it is clear that Google is dedicated to transforming the search environment and favouring high-quality, human-created content.
Back to Basics
This move by Google encourages a shift away from relying on AI-generated material and advocating for original, insightful, and genuinely valuable content for readers. Content creators, right now, it’s more important than ever to go back to human-crafted content that demonstrates expertise, engages audiences, and maintains a unique perspective. Make the transition to not only align with Google’s enhanced guidelines but also cater to the audience’s desire for genuine, relatable content.
While the Vigilante Marketing writers leverage AI as a tool to assist writing; the content we write will always be well-researched, engaging, informative, unique, and keyword-optimized. If you need assistance with blog, case study, or site content creation, the Vigilante Marketing Team is here to help.
