Google Strikes Back: Spam Doesn't Stand a Chance!

I was going to take a content break, and then Google decided to push out a huge Google core update, telling us that everything in search is changing. So, I spent some time reviewing what Google has said, and I have some predictions about this that I've got to share with you. But here's the deal: it's going down—hopefully not your web traffic, just this big update that started yesterday. So, if you're watching this when I publish it, this update began rolling out yesterday—a core update and a spam update.

First of all, let's look at what Google is reporting. They're showing right here for 2024 the March 2024 spam update and core update both starting March 5th. The core update says it could take up to a month to finish rolling out, and the spam update over the next two weeks. But a lot is going on here. This isn't like a lot of core updates where we just have no idea. Google doesn't give us any direction. Google published this blog post that talks a little bit about what they're trying to do with this specific update and with another one that's coming, probably in May.

Now, that alone—the fact that Google's telling us about it—tells us something already. Whenever Google gives us a heads up about what they're trying to do right now, or especially what they're trying to do in the future, usually it's because they want us to proactively start moving in that direction and not wait for the algorithm update to start correcting our behavior. Okay, we saw this with core web vitals. Google told us the way in advance that they were going to start using these core web vitals and that those were going to become actual ranking factors. So, what did everybody do? They started focusing on how to make sure their sites were fast enough and that they would meet the specific criteria Google was searching for with their core web vitals. So, our pages would load quickly, things wouldn't shift around a whole bunch. We worked hard ahead of time, and in the end, how much of an impact did core web vitals have on search? Very little. I'm not saying that Google's not doing anything here—they probably are. But usually, they tell us because they want us to change our behavior, whereas, with a lot of updates, they don't tell us exactly what they're trying to change or even give us a lot of explanation as to what they're going for. I think in large part because they don't want us to know; they want us to just keep making good content. In this case, they're like, "You need to make better content, and you better get started doing it quick because as of right now, certain things that were maybe considered acceptable and were doing really well are now being officially labeled as spam, specifically, so that Google can start taking targeted action against such content."

Let's dive into this in a little bit more detail, okay? High level, here they're trying to improve the quality of the ranking. As we've seen for the last several months, the quality of the SERPs is pretty questionable, especially varying from query to query. But we're seeing a lot of content that isn't very good, which is ironic because that was all part of the helpful content stuff. This is still helpful content, but like I've been saying actually for a few months now, I don't think Google feels like where we're at today with the SERPs is where they want to be, and that they're going to continue to move toward this direction. That I'm not surprised they're moving in, and I think it's actually a good thing if you're not just trying to game the system and you're actually creating good content, which is what we've been promoting since we started.

The first thing that Google covers is reducing low-quality unoriginal results. Now, you can read this blog post—I will link to it in the description in a pinned comment below. But I want to do a little bit of interpretation. I've been doing this for a long time, and I think that it's easy to take some of the wrong things away from this. So, I'm giving you my predictions. I can't in any way say for certainty what is actually going to happen as a result of this update. Anybody who thinks they know exactly what's changing already is either a narcissist or a liar. So, um, I'm sorry, it's just how it is. So, that's my disclaimer for you: these are my predictions, all right?

So, low-quality unoriginal results. Way back in 2022, they started tuning their ranking systems to get rid of unhelpful content or at least to suppress it in the SERPs, and we've already seen this starting to happen. I used to get like seven blog posts for a search query that all said the same thing, and chances are they were all based off of one of the blog posts that was the original one, and that one might have been ranking number seven or might have been number 40 in the SERPs, not even ranking anywhere near the top. That's already been reduced dramatically where Google's just trying to pick out the most original one and put it there. Well, now they're just further refining that helpful content algorithm to hopefully better fine-tune—that's what they say, trying to fine-tune and better understand if web pages are really helpful. If you look at the Quality Rater guidelines Google uses, you learn a ton about what it is that Google's trying to work toward, right? Any particular web page should serve a purpose. There should be a main purpose that every blog post, every page on your website. And if that page meets its intended purpose, then it's helpful. If you have content that is supposed to answer a question but doesn't really do it, that's not helpful, and Google is, hopefully, they think at least doing a better job of being able to distinguish that. Now, this next sentence is one that I think raised alarm bells for a few people, and I want to spend just a minute on it. It says, "This could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries." One of the things that I've personally taught for years is that when you write content, we should first think about is there a search query that someone is actually likely to search that this article would answer. It doesn't do any good to just write about the things you want to write about if they don't match any real searches. That's why we do keyword research. The whole concept of keyword research, or as we call our process search analysis, is to try to figure out the things that people are looking for and to create content that answers those questions. So, is that now a problem? Aren't we supposed to help people and answer their questions? Isn't relevance literally the number one ranking factor, how relevant your content is for the question somebody asked? Yes, it still is. Notice the wording here: "This could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries." Here's what I'm thinking about: sites that literally are just keyword stuffing like crazy. We see sites where they're going for exact match domain—literally writing either a question or an answer to the question as the domain of their website. And the whole website is

very geared toward answering a handful of very, very specific search queries. That's not really a natural content creation process. And so, I think it's important that we pause and do take a step back and make sure that we're not going down that rabbit hole of literally just like, "I'm just going to answer very specific narrow questions." Usually, though, when I write a blog post, it's answering several questions, and we see that show up in Google Search Console when I see the kinds of queries that those blog posts rank for. And when I write those blog posts, the words kind of, for me at least, they kind of flow out in a way that feels very natural, kind of conversational, and it's really like the way that I would approach helping my friend or my neighbor or a family member if they were to come to me with those same types of questions. If Google is trying to target that, I don't know what the whole point of this is anymore. I don't know what the whole point of a search engine is if it's not to help you find answers to your questions. So, don't worry so much and think that, "Oh, yep, Google's going to target niche websites because they answer people's questions." No, that's not it at all. But just don't get so hyper-focused on only answering very specific questions that your content isn't actually helpful. They say that this latest update that's going out right now, in addition to all of the other updates they've made over the last two years related to helpful content, they're going to be reducing unhelpful content that shows up by about 40%. It's a lot of blog posts that aren't getting traffic anymore, but it's also a lot of really crummy content not getting traffic anymore. Whether or not this update makes a huge shift in the content we see in the SERP, specifically regarding helpful and unhelpful content, I think that it's an important indicator of what Google's working towards, which means that we can't continue to write duplicates of content that's already out there. You have to add something every time that you write a blog post. You should be thinking about what is it that I can add to the internet—something that's not quite there. That doesn't mean it has to be totally 100% original—everything that we know is based off of some experience that we've had, and usually, some knowledge we gained from somebody else. Nothing's going to be 100% original. But what is it that you can do with that topic or that search query that you're trying to answer that you're trying to respond to? What can you do with that to make your content a little more helpful, a little more original? Is there a way that you could gather some additional data or just use your own experience? If you actually live your niche to some level, you're going to have personal experience that you can bring to bear that's going to make your content unique compared to the other stuff that's on the web.

Alright, now that was the first piece. The second piece is about trying to keep more spam content out of the search results. They're actually really broadening their definition of spam, and again, this is where they said, "This targeted action thing." These updates allow us to take more targeted action under our spam policies. That should raise an alarm bell. If Google wants to take targeted action against specific content, you don't want to be that content, trust me. And they're telling us so that we stop making this kind of content. So, first of all, scaled content abuse. They're using the word abuse again; that should raise some alarm bells in your head. They say they've long had a policy against generating like this autogenerated really low-quality content. There's a lot of content on the web like this where it's like literally you have a dataset and based on that dataset it generates a thousand pages on your website that each one is more like a directory listing than really a post. And it's oftentimes not very helpful. That's probably like one of the more easy to understand versions of autogenerated content in today's world. Though there's a lot of AI-generated content that's able to take that a step further, and I don't think Google cares if it's AI that generates the content or not. But autogenerating content at large scale without paying any attention to the quality of that content is what Google's talking about. In fact, they say that exactly here. They say, "Today, scaled content creation methods are more sophisticated." And that makes it really unclear if that content was created automatically or not. So, they say they're strengthening their policy. What does that mean exactly? I don't know, but they say they're strengthening their policy to focus more on this abusive behavior, the abusive behavior being generating massive amounts of autogenerated content. Or at least, whether it's even all autogenerated, I don't even think matters. By just creating mass amounts of content in an attempt to game the algorithm. In fact, that's what they say. I keep getting ahead of them—producing content at scale to boost search ranking. We've talked about this to some degree, and I think it's easy to conflate that a little bit with topical authority, meaning we want to create topical authority by exhausting our topic pretty well, right? So, when we come up with a topic that we want to write about, and within our overall industry, our overall niche, the overall topic of our website, right? And then within there, there's going to be a bunch of subtopics, and within each one of those, there's going to be a bunch of different places where we could create a whole cluster of content around just this one aspect of the topic. That I think still going to be a good thing. The point here though is to create really helpful content within that. We shouldn't just be writing 30 blog posts in a cluster and just generating that super fast, not worrying about the quality, just making sure that we have something that looks like it answers all the questions around that little topic and then move on to the next one and end up with thousands of blog posts in the matter of six months. Google can tell that that's not really a natural form of content creation. And so somehow, Google says that they're strengthening their policy to be able to better identify. Maybe they actually don't say that they're going to be better at identifying this, but when they find it, they're strengthening their policy so that they're able to take that targeted action against such websites. And they say whether automation, humans, or a combination are involved. It doesn't matter. If you generate 2,000 blog posts that were all written by humans but the quality of the content isn't good, and you're just trying to make sure you exhaust all the search queries or all the keywords of that topic, you got to write good stuff. Otherwise, Google just doesn't want to show it.

Alright, next, site reputation abuse. I actually am pretty excited about this one. I love the way they described it, so I'm going to read it here for you, but then we'll have a little bit of discussion about it. 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. I am currently going

to call out basically every news site on the internet, as well as a lot of other just very large authoritative sites in most industries where they have just established a ton of authority over time. So, everybody wants a backlink from those guys, right? So, what do they do? They write a guest post, editorial, and it does not by any means meet the quality standards of the rest of the website. The accuracy of the content is abysmal, and it just sucks to read. We see this all the time. And then what do they do? They go to their website, and they say this website was featured on Forbes and CNBC and MSNBC and all these other news sites and all these other reputable websites in their industry or just reputable across news. So, they cover like all industries. Google's saying that that's spam, and they're going to start taking targeted action. So, how much do you think all of these different organizations are going to start paying more attention to the kind of content that you're trying to publish on their websites? I think it's going to be a lot harder to get a guest post on any of their websites without making sure that you meet strict quality guidelines. We've never put a lot of effort into those types of PR campaigns because, to me, it just feels fake, especially because most of the content basically is fake. I don't know how much they're charging to post a guest post, but I'm sure they're making some little side income, and news organizations are, I think, hurting for money in a lot of cases. And so, they're willing to do that. But it's gotten to the point where when I see as featured on and then they list out a whole bunch of different big websites, to me, that means basically nothing. I'd rather be cited as a source, as an authority, like where I got interviewed for an article. Like I think literally like the hor approach is probably going to be more useful than this because if someone's citing you as an authority for like an actual news piece, then that's a real vote in your favor. But just having an article that sucks written on one of these websites says nothing about you. And now, Google's going to start treating it like the spam that it is.

Alright, moving on to the next one, expired domain abuse. This is the last one that Google specifically pointed out. Who knows what other things they're going to kind of mix in and consider as spam content now. But this is one that's been talked about a lot in this industry, and I've never gotten on board with it. And that is the purchasing of expired domains to try to sort of get a head start on SEO. Now, I get it. I understand why people want to do it, and I'm not totally like anti-, but realistically, like my website should eventually end up with real authority, real credibility based upon the work that we do, not based upon what somebody did in the past or based upon a bunch of links I was able to buy. Like on its own merit, my stuff should be able to be authoritative, and I should be able to be authoritative by participating in the industry in a normal natural way. When you buy an expired domain, you're basically trying to take any credibility that a previous website had that used your domain and sort of use that as a starting point. Now it's only a starting point. The quality of the content you publish is ultimately what's going to dictate the level of authority you land at. But a lot of people have been getting a head start and avoiding what we typically call the Google sandbox. Well, Google's saying that, you know what, sometimes expired domains are purchased and repurposed with the primary intention of boosting search ranking of low-quality and unoriginal content. This can mislead users into thinking the new content is part of the older site, which may not be the case. Or, in the case of like the entire approach to that people take to expired domains in this industry, it's never intended to be part of the old site. It's intended typically to be a new website that's just leeching off the authority that the previous website had. Well, this is now considered spam. Does that mean that whenever I buy a domain, I need to make sure that it's never been used before? No, I don't think so. I think if you're publishing high-quality content on your new website, it doesn't really matter that much. But if you're going to take any of these approaches that a lot of people in our industry are taking to publish large amounts of crummy content and now you're doing it on expired domain, like these are all huge red flags for Google. And frankly, I don't mind that they're considering all this spam. I think this actually works out really well for any of you that have been creating websites the way that we've been teaching you how to create them all along. So, like I said in the beginning, this update, it's going down. It's going down right now. Over the next two to four weeks, you're going to be seeing a lot of changes probably happening in the SERPs. You may see some fluctuations in traffic. Hopefully, as this is going down, your traffic's not going down and is actually going up. We'll see. And as things roll out, we'll do our best to try to keep you updated on what we're seeing. And like always, I encourage you to learn your industry, get involved, and be able to actually speak from your own experience as you create content. That's just going to make it so much easier and make your content so much more original, so much more helpful, so much more unique. And that really is what Google's been after for years. And they're just going to keep getting better at it. So, even if this update isn't the one that completely puts the nail in the coffin for crap content, it's coming, and it's just going to keep getting better.