Google is currently in the process of rolling out one of its biggest updates in a long time and if you own a website, it’s likely to affect you.
Google holds around 90% of the search engine market share, with the majority of online traffic coming from the Search Engine any updates they make to search results usually affect how much traffic your website receives.
The updates are aimed at targeting the rise in AI-generated content and several other areas of areas where Google believes webmasters are manipulating search results.
What should you do as a business?
Here are all the things you should be aware of that Google is targeting in this latest update:
Mass-generated AI content (Scaled content abuse)
Google specially is looking for low-quality or unoriginal content at scale to manipulate search rankings which is a clear reference to the rise of AI-generated content at scale.
If you’ve been publishing AI-generated content at mass with no real process around proofreading or editing then you could be hit with a penalty.
Expired domain abuse
This is a common tactic used when wanting to give a new website a ‘boost’ in authority where an expired domain is purchased (usually with a good backlink profile) and then redirected to your new site and passed on that authority.
There are instances where this can be done responsibly, but Google has now stated that ‘Expired domains that are purchased and repurposed to boost the search ranking of low-quality content are now considered spam’ meaning that it’s likely a LOT of websites will be affected.
Creating content ‘just for clicks’
This update involves Google refining their ranking systems and looking at webpages on an individual level to see if they are created just for search engines or actually for people.
An example of this would be someone buying a domain such as bestrunningshoes.com to try and rank for the keyword ‘best running shoes’ faster than you would do with say a branded domain.
Site reputation abuse
There’s been a rise over the last few years of affiliate marketers ‘renting’ areas of websites to build out their directories and ride the authority of a much larger website to get their content ranking faster and generating affiliate sales.
If Google are worried about these kinds of practices it’s not only the ‘black hats’ they should be going after, but also having a conversation with these large websites that are renting out their websites for this kind of activity.
Here’s an example of Forbes renting out an area of their site for affiliate purposes https://forbes.com/advisor
What you can do
If you or your team have been using any of the tactics above then you should be keeping an eye on your Search Consoles this month as Google runs its core update.
For any questions about your SEO strategy or uncertainties about what you’ve been implementing over the past year, you can follow Google’s Search Status Dashboard or contact a Digital Marketing Agency to consult on best practices for your online business.