Google Targets AI-Generated Spam: SEO Impact And Strategies For Quality Content

Amid criticisms about the declining quality of its search results, Google is adjusting its algorithms to more effectively filter out spammy or automated content. The company asserts that the forthcoming ranking updates, scheduled for May, will “keep the lowest-quality content out of search.” Of particular significance, Google states that its engine will be more adept at identifying and eliminating today's automated (i.e., AI-generated) content, which can be challenging to detect.

Google indicates that it's leveraging insights gained from a 2022 algorithmic adjustment aimed at "reducing unhelpful, unoriginal content" and applying them to the new update. The company asserts that these changes will direct more traffic toward "helpful and high-quality sites." When combined with the adjustments made two years ago, Google estimates that the revision will decrease spammy, unoriginal search results by 40 percent.

Elizabeth Tucker, Google's product management director, explains, “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.”

Google appears to be targeting AI-generated SEO spam with its emphasis on addressing scaled content abuse. The company indicates that it's bolstering its approach to combatting the proliferation of websites generating low-quality automated articles, as well as focusing on traditional human-created spam.

“Today, scaled content creation methods are more sophisticated, and whether content is created purely through automation isn’t always as clear,” Tucker explains. Google states that the changes “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.”

Google's vice president of search, Pandu Nayak, explains, “A good example of it, which has been around for a little while, is the abuse around obituary spam.”

What is obituary spam? Obituary spam represents a particularly somber form of digital piracy, where individuals seek to profit by scraping and reposting death notices, occasionally on platforms such as YouTube. Lately, obituary spammers have turned to artificial intelligence tools to amplify their production, exacerbating the problem. If Google's new policy is successfully implemented, it should pose a greater challenge for such spam to infiltrate online searches.

This increasingly assertive strategy to combat search spam directly targets "domain squatting," a tactic where opportunists acquire websites with established recognition to capitalize on their reputations. Frequently, they substitute original journalism with AI-generated articles engineered to manipulate search engine rankings. While this behavior predates the AI surge, the proliferation of text-generation tools like ChatGPT has made it significantly easier to produce countless articles aimed at gaming Google rankings.

Apart from targeting domain squatting, Google's updated policy will also concentrate on eradicating "reputation abuse," whereby reputable websites permit third-party sources to publish low-quality sponsored content or other digital debris. Google's blog post illustrates an example of this as "payday loan reviews on a trusted educational 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,” Tucker notes.

The increasing problem of AI-generated content farms indiscriminately generating content to manipulate search rankings underscores the importance of Google's changes, provided they deliver on their promises. While sites exclusively spamming such content may be easier to identify, it remains to be seen if once-reputable outlets experimenting with AI-generated spam will be affected.

While enforcement for other aspects of the spam policy will commence immediately, Google is providing a 60-day notice before taking action against reputational abuse, allowing websites an opportunity to align with the new guidelines.

The search engine changes are set to take effect on May 5.