In March 2024, Google updated its quality ranking system to ensure that low-quality content will be penalised and therefore down-ranked. Emily Carr, marketing intern at V Formation, provides an overview of the update and explains its implication for content creators.
Why was the Google update necessary?
In a world of generative AI, search engines such as Google are being flooded with low quality, unhelpful content that’s been specifically created in an effort to ‘trick’ the search engines and rank websites higher, rather than to benefit users. The Google update will ensure that more traffic is being sent to helpful and high-quality sites that follow Google’s E-E-A-T quality testing framework, instead of lower quality sites such as those that have been inappropriately AI-optimised and therefore, don’t provide users with helpful, factual and credible information.
What is generative AI and how is it being used in SEO?
Generative AI is a machine learning model based on human inputs. It can be used to create a wide variety of content and assets; including short form content (such as a social media caption), long form content (such as an article) and imagery to name just a few. AI is growing more and more popular for creating SEO optimised website content, such as landing page copy and meta data, mainly due to its time and resource-saving nature. ChatGPT remains at the forefront of this trend with its hundreds of millions of users.
What is the E-E-A-T framework that Google uses to quality-test content?
This format stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness and it’s how Google evaluates the quality and credibility of content. It’s sometimes thought that AI-generated content is automatically penalised by Google’s quality scoring system, but this isn’t entirely true. Generally, as long as website content follows and adheres to the E-E-A-T format and provides users with the information that they’re looking for, it will pass Google’s quality checks.
Has the update been successful?
On 19 April 2024, Google reported that there has been significantly less low-quality content on the search engine with a decrease of 45% since January. Google is identifying and targeting content that offers a poor user experience as a result of ‘tricking’ search engines into giving it a high ranking. This kind of content isn’t valuable to Google’s audience and is therefore penalised.
With this in mind, we recommend investing more time and resource into ensuring that all content is genuine, informative and aimed at human readers, NOT search engines.
Chat GPT – friend or foe for SEO?
AI can and should be used as a tool to help your business flourish, and as we mentioned earlier, AI-generated content of high-quality will not be penalised. However, for the content to be perceived as high quality, it needs to pass Google’s E-E-A-T screening process. To avoid being penalised (or potentially judged!) for writing in collaboration with AI, adding a disclaimer could be considered.
We all want to manoeuvre our way to the top of Google results, but shortcuts won’t get you there. At V Formation we have an experienced digital marketing team that will combine their expert knowledge with powerful SEO tools to ensure your that website is easy to find through authentic and relevant content creation, link building and keyword research whilst also ensuring that your website is running smoothly and performing well from a technical perspective behind the scenes.