Google, Social Media and the Internet: Three Simple Examples of Google Unleashing and Planning for Improved Page Ranking and Search Engine Optimization

But for Google to continue to be Google, it has to be good at finding good stuff on the web. The company has been clear for a long time, that it wants to care about humans and prioritize their needs over the interests of machines and clickbait. But it’s a long road ahead.

Nayak lays out three examples of what Google now considers spammy behavior and intends to downrank. The first is content at scale: the sites that create thousands of low-quality articles a day, either through low-paid contractors or AI generators, and target that content at search results. A problem to be solved in this country is obituary fraud, as pointed out by Nayak.

The second spammy behavior is what Nayak calls “site reputation abuse.” It is when an otherwise respectable website rents out part of its website for nonsense and if you have ever seen the other sites that make you wonder why they have coupons or why there’s a whole rest of the site that seems irrelevant, you know what I mean. The third is “expired domain abuse,” which is when someone buys an abandoned but high-ranking domain and fills it with crummy content that then jumps to the top of search. The current state of The Hairpin is one example of how this can happen, which Wired has covered well in recent weeks.

For those engaging in site reputation abuse, Nayak says Google is giving the sites 60 days to cut it out before it makes the ranking changes. Now, the others go into effect. According to a report by The Huffington Post, the internet search engine has a problem with email and is trying to shut it down. When low quality information gets control of rankings, it is the healthy, high-quality environment that gets affected.

The job is not finished, that is for sure. The battle to bring the power of Artificial Intelligence to everyone on the web is just starting and will create many headaches for the company, which is trying to save the web. Even the search engine itself is becoming an artificial intelligence machine. And there will always be new, sneakier ways to game your way to the top of search results. This is a headache of Google’s own making: most of the chum on the web exists entirely to game Google, and so Google will always be one step behind.

“It sounds like it’s going to be one of the biggest updates in the history of Google,” says Lily Ray, senior director of SEO at the marketing agency Amsive. “It could change everything.”

The spike in domain squatting is just one of the issues that have tarnished Google Search’s reputation in recent years. “People can spin up these sites really easily,” says one of the owners of a digital marketing firm. “It’s been a big issue.” Though he says he no longer does it, Boyne admits to creating similar sites in the past.

Since the end of last year, the company has been working on a specific update. More broadly, the company has been working on ways to fix low-quality content in search, including AI-generated spam, since 2022. It was aware of the problem, says Nayak. “It takes time to develop these changes effectively.”