Unlocking Google’s Search Updates: Empowering Your Quest for Knowledge!
What is Google?
Imagine you’re on a quest for information in a vast library filled with billions of books. Each book contains different knowledge, and your goal is to find the most relevant ones to your query. Now, let’s relate this library to the internet, and you’re using Google as your librarian.
Google’s search engine is like that librarian, tirelessly organizing and categorizing the vast expanse of web pages so that when you search for something, it can quickly present you with the most relevant results. But just like any library, Google constantly updates its system to improve how it finds and presents information. These updates are like tuning the librarian’s methods to make sure you get the best possible answers to your questions.
One type of update is called an algorithm update. Think of Google’s algorithm as the librarian’s secret formula for sorting through all those web pages. When Google updates its algorithm, it’s like giving the librarian a new set of instructions on how to organize the books. These updates can happen for various reasons, like improving accuracy, fighting spam, or adapting to changes in how people search.
Sometimes, Google makes bigger changes to its search index. You can think of the search index as a gigantic catalog of all the web pages Google knows about. When Google updates its search index, it’s like adding new books to the library or rearranging the existing ones. This helps ensure that the search results are as up-to-date and relevant as possible.
Refreshes are another type of update. These are like giving the library a spring cleaning. Google refreshes its search index regularly to make sure it’s still accurate and up-to-date. It’s like dusting off the shelves and making sure everything is in its right place.
For someone new to the world of Google updates, it might seem like a lot to keep track of. But the goal of all these updates is simple: to make sure you, the searcher, get the best possible results when you’re looking for information. So the next time you type a question into Google, remember that there’s a whole team of librarians working behind the scenes to help you find what you’re looking for.
Today we announced the March 2024 core update. This is designed to improve the quality of Search by showing less content that feels like it was made to attract clicks, and more content that people find useful. We also shared that we have new spam policies to better handle the practices that can negatively impact Google’s search results.
Every day, people turn to Search to find the best of what the web has to offer. We’ve long had policies and automated systems to fight against spammers, and we work to address emerging tactics that look to game our results with low-quality content. We regularly update those policies and systems to effectively tackle these trends so we can continue delivering useful content and connecting people with high-quality websites.
Today we’re announcing key changes we’re making to improve the quality of Search and the helpfulness of your results:
- Improved quality ranking: We’re making algorithmic enhancements to our core ranking systems to ensure we surface the most helpful information on the web and reduce unoriginal content in search results.
- New and improved spam policies: We’re updating our spam policies to keep the lowest-quality content out of Search, like expired websites repurposed as spam repositories by new owners and obituary spam.
Reducing low-quality, unoriginal results
In 2022, we began tuning our ranking systems to reduce unhelpful, unoriginal content on Search and keep it at very low levels. We’re bringing what we learned from that work into the March 2024 core update.
This update involves refining some of our core ranking systems to help us better understand if webpages are unhelpful, have a poor user experience or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people. This could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries.
We believe these updates will reduce the amount of low-quality content on Search and send more traffic to helpful and high-quality sites. Based on our evaluations, we expect that the combination of this update and our previous efforts will collectively reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%.
Keeping more spam out of your results
For decades, we’ve relied on advanced spam-fighting systems and spam policies to prevent the lowest-quality content from appearing in search results — and that work continues.
We’re making several updates to our spam policies to better address new and evolving abusive practices that lead to unoriginal, low-quality content showing up on Search. We’ll take action on more types of these manipulative behaviors starting today. While our ranking systems keep many types of low-quality content from ranking highly on Search, these updates allow us to take more targeted action under our spam policies.
Scaled content abuse
We’ve long had a policy against using automation to generate low-quality or unoriginal content at scale with the goal of manipulating search rankings. This policy was originally designed to address instances of content being generated at scale where it was clear that automation was involved.
Today, scaled content creation methods are more sophisticated, and whether content is created purely through automation isn’t always as clear. To better address these techniques, we’re strengthening our policy to focus on this abusive behavior — producing content at scale to boost search ranking — whether automation, humans or a combination are involved. This will allow us to 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.
Site reputation abuse
Sometimes, websites that have their own great content may also host low-quality content provided by third parties with the goal of capitalizing on the hosting site’s strong reputation. For example, a third party might publish payday loan reviews on a trusted educational website to gain ranking benefits from the site. Such content ranking highly on Search can confuse or mislead visitors who may have vastly different expectations for the content on a given website.
We’ll now consider very low-value, third-party content produced primarily for ranking purposes and without close oversight of a website owner to be spam. We’re publishing this policy two months in advance of enforcement on May 5, to give site owners time to make any needed changes.
Expired domain abuse
Occasionally, expired domains are purchased and repurposed with the primary intention of boosting search ranking of low-quality or unoriginal content. This can mislead users into thinking the new content is part of the older site, which may not be the case. Expired domains that are purchased and repurposed with the intention of boosting the search ranking of low-quality content are now considered spam.
Search helps people with billions of questions every day, but there will always be areas where we can improve. We’ll continue to work hard at keeping low-quality content on Search to low levels, and showing more information created to help people.
Google core updates for March 2024 are major to the search engine and are as follows:
April 11 Explanation of the beta carousels feature
- What: The beta carousel feature is clarified for websites that possess a summary page linking to other detailed pages on their site. The necessary markup should be present on the summary page, and there’s no requirement to add markup to the detail pages to qualify for this feature.
Reasoning: In response to feedback and queries received, we’ve provided more precise guidance on the supported use cases and the specific page where markup should be applied. This update pertains solely to documentation, without altering the feature’s requirements or eligibility criteria.
March 2024 March 28 Enhanced explanation of the changelog entry regarding Web Stories availability
- What: Google further elaborated on their February 8 changelog entry concerning the availability of Web Stories in Google Images.
Reason: Web Stories continue to be visible in Google Images, akin to other web content, albeit without the Web Stories icon. Additionally, a bug hindering Search Console reporting for these URLs in Google Images has been resolved.
March 25 Introduction of 3D models for products
- What: New support for 3DModel markup has been incorporated for merchant listings in the product structured data documentation.
Reason: At times, 3D models are featured on pages hosting multiple products without clear association with any particular one. This markup facilitates site owners in linking a 3D model to a specific product.
March 12 Refinement of references to page experience and Core Web Vitals
- What: Google’s documentation on page experience, signed exchanges, and ecommerce pagination has been clarified concerning the discussion around page experience and Core Web Vitals. Additionally, it’s been updated to reflect that INP is now considered a Core Web Vital, replacing FID.
Reason: INP has taken the place of FID as a Core Web Vital, hence the need for clarification and updates in Google’s documentation.
March 6 Streamlining of recipe documentation
- What: Guided recipes have been removed from the recipe structured data documentation.
Reason: With the removal of this Google Assistant feature, Google’s updating their recipe markup documentation to accurately reflect this change. Site owners need not make any adjustments; all properties remain recommended for use in Google Search.
March 5 Introduction of new spam policies Three new spam policies have been added: expired domain abuse, scaled content abuse, and site reputation abuse. Additionally, a new FAQ on helpful content has been included. For further details on these updates and the reasons behind them, refer to our blog post.
Generic Chrome version for Google StoreBot
- What: The user agent for Google StoreBot (in Overview of Google crawlers) has been updated to employ a placeholder version of Chrome. If you’ve hardcoded the previous value in your code, ensure to update it to disregard the version.
Reason: This update aims to facilitate the Google Shopping team in maintaining the StoreBot crawler efficiently.
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