A hot potato: While we wait for the global revolution that AI algorithms will surely bring, Google is trying to survive the incoming spam-apocalypse enabled by automatic content generation at scale. The company is seemingly improving its web search platform with more stringent rules against meaningless web pages.

Chatbots and generative AI services have brought an undeniable revolution to the content business on the web, and traditional search engines are suffering the consequences. Machine learning and trained AI algorithms can potentially generate an infinite amount of fake blog posts, articles, and reviews with very little aid from human writers, and Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are now showing lower-quality results to users.

The situation is only getting worse, but Google is willing to fight against spammers. The company has announced a new "March 2024 core" update for its Search service, with significant changes designed to improve the quality of search results. Key changes of the March 2024 update include "algorithmic enhancements" to Google's ranking systems to improve SERP quality and new spam policies designed to keep the lowest-quality content "out of Search."

The fight against "unhelpful, unoriginal" content on Search began in 2022, Google said, and the latest update builds on what the company learned in the past two years. Core ranking algorithms have been refined to penalize poor user experience or webpages that "feel" like they have been created to be consumed by search engines instead of people, Google stated.

Thanks to the new tweaked algorithms and previous anti-spam efforts, Google engineers "expect" to reduce low-quality content in search results by 40 percent. Spam filters and policies are being updated as well, so that the tech can better address "new and evolving abusive practices" that are filling SERP with unoriginal content.

Like many other technology companies that built empires on user-generated content, Google is now trying to put AI at the center of every new service and business venture. Understandably, the Mountain View corporation is trying very hard to explain how it will fight search spam without providing any single mention of AI algorithms, which are now routinely abused to generate content farms and meaningless web pages.

Google's updated spam policies are seemingly better prepared to tackle "abusive practices" like the aforementioned AI algorithms, and the company will now take action against manipulative behaviors, such as content generated at scale to game search rankings. Google will also penalize site reputation abuse practices, like websites with previously published "great content" that try to appear higher in SERP pages by hosting additional, often unrelated SEO-optimized rubbish.

Site owners involved in this kind of reputation abuse will have until May 5 to change their behavior; otherwise, Google said it will take action. The company will also penalize attempts to abuse expired domains, marking as spam long-gone websites that resurface under new management only to spread low-quality content in Search.