On March 5, 2024, Google announced a major update regarding spam.
Google’s new spam policy aims to eliminate practices that can negatively impact the quality of search results.
It’s designed to improve the search experience by showing less content that looks like it’s designed to attract clicks and more content that people find useful.
Sites that violate the spam policy may rank lower in the results or may not appear in the results at all.
Three new spam policies against bad practices
1) Expired domain abuse
Expired domain abuse is the act of purchasing an expired domain name and repurposing it primarily to manipulate search rankings by posting content that provides little or no value to users.
2) Scaled content abuse
Scaled content abuse is when many pages are created for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings rather than helping users. This practice typically aims to create a large amount of unoriginal content that provides little or no value to users, regardless of how it is created, through automation, human effort, or some combination of human and automated processes.
Google’s spam policy is that the use of automation, including generative artificial intelligence, is spam if the primary purpose is to manipulate search rankings.
Producing content on a large scale is abusive if it is done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings, and that this applies regardless of whether automation or humans are involved.
3) Site reputation abuse
Site reputation abuse is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate Search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site’s ranking signals.
New policy does not consider all third-party content to be a violation, only that which is posted without close supervision and intended to manipulate search rankings. Advertising content is not spam.
