Google Search Spam Policy Update: Manual Actions for Thousands of Sites!

On March 05, 2024, Google released a blog post on The Keyword (the official blog of Google) sharing how Google will now tackle the low-quality and spammy content websites that content marketers and SEOs were developing using automation or other techniques.

This is not just another Google Algo update as hundreds of site owners are reporting on X and other social media platforms that their years-old websites are also getting Manual Actions and most of the sites are completely disappeared from the search index.

Making this one a unique update, the Google team started sending Manual Actions to hundreds of websites on 6th March just one day after announcing new ways of tackling spam and low-quality content on the SERPs.

Why this update?

Google suggested that it will help Google Search users to find more helpful information on the web and massively hide content that’s not original or created just for the rankings, not helping the end user/reader.

Taking it further, Google also shared that they are making the lowest-quality websites to stay out of their search results pages and it will also be a break for those who were creating spam sites using the expired domains.

Is it a good sign?

Well, for many bloggers and site owners who have been publishing original content and still got a manual action, it is a wrong thing, but there are thousands of sites that popped up in Google search results after OpenAI released their ChatGPT to the general public. People started using their API to create websites overnight with hundreds of pages being published with AI-generated content that’s low-quality and not helpful to anyone.

Google calls it “Scaled Content Abuse” and it is really the right term for AI-generated websites that are publishing thousands of articles without any human interaction at all. This is also not good for those who spend hours researching and creating an article on one topic while AI just copies/pastes and ruins their work in a few seconds.

This might also be an alarming sign for websites with single authors and websites that started publishing about one topic and then started publishing about hundreds of topics without having any quality articles on any new topic they are publishing. Like if there’s a website with a name for Pizza and it is publishing content on Law and Finance too, it is an alarming sign that the website is being used to manipulate the SERPs and it is against Google’s new spam policies.

Also, expired domain-hunters have to look at this update as this might make them go nuts. As Google is now giving hard times to those who were finding expired domains without checking their niche before the expiration but just the backlinks and they were using these domains to rank their main websites. This might not work after this Google update.

So, overall, the new Google Search Update for Spam looks too hard for hundreds of site owners but it is useful for Google users who use Google to find helpful content every day and they don’t want to land on a website that is generated by a computer or doesn’t really help to solve their problem.

More on this later, but for now, Google is just killing ai-generated sites and sites with low-quality content even if they are built by humans and the text is also written by humans.

This means more power to helpful content publishers, and less ranking for low-quality articles.