Google announced new measures to combat spam on its search engine. The company has tightened its content quality criteria and expanded its definition of spam to exclude sites from search results that do not provide useful information to users. reported on the company’s blog.
Google has improved its algorithms to better recognize and filter content that is not created for humans but for the purpose of manipulating rankings. This content often contains duplicate or irrelevant keywords, hidden text, redirects, and other techniques that violate Google’s policies. Such improvements are expected to reduce the share of spam in search results by 40%.
Additionally, Google has added two new categories of spam that will be monitored and removed from searches. The first of these concerns content published on reliable sites but does not correspond to their subject or quality. For example, if an article about payday loans appears on an educational website that is not related to education. Such content may mislead users and abuse their trust. Such content will be marked as spam starting May 5th.
The second category of spam includes domains that have expired and are re-registered to host low-quality or unoriginal content. For example, a user creates a new site with bad content and hosts it on an old domain that used to belong to a reputable site. Thus, it tries to deceive the search engine and users. Such sites will also be considered spam and will lose their position in searches.
Previously at HRC named Google is the world’s main censorship tool.