How will Google regulate scaled content abuse? The case of obituary piracy, the hairpin case, and site reputation abuse
In a blog post, Google claims the change will reduce “low-quality, unoriginal content” in search results by 40 percent. It will focus on reducing what the company calls “scaled content abuse,” which is when bad actors flood the internet with massive amounts of articles and blog posts designed to game search engines.
A good example of this is the abuse around obituaries, which has been around for a while. Obituary trash is one of the worst type of digital piracy, where people attempt to make money by using death notices to post on social platforms. Recently, obituary spammers have started using artificial intelligence tools to increase their output, making the issue even worse. If the policies are put in place effectively, the new policy will make it harder for this type of junk to show up in online searches.
The second behavior is called site reputation abuse. You’ve surely seen the websites that make you wonder why they have coupons, or why there’s a whole part of the site that seems irrelevant, but an otherwise respectable website rents out part of its site for spammy nonsense. Exercized domain abuse is when someone buys an abandoned but top-ranked domains and fills it with meaningless junk that gets them to the top of search. The Hairpin is an example of how this can happen, and was covered by wired in recent weeks.
It has been reported that the sites that engage in site reputation abuse will not be given a chance to get their sites removed from the ranking list. The others go into effect now. Google has a spam problem, it knows it, and it’s trying to shut it down. The healthy, high-quality environment is the one that is affected by the control of ranking by low-quality sources.
The job is not done, of course. The battle over how to rank AI-generated content is just beginning and will cause plenty of headaches for the company, as it tries to save the web from being overrun by it. (Even Google’s own search engine is increasingly an AI machine.) And there will always be new, sneakier ways to game your way to the top of search results. This is a problem for Google, since most of the web is meant to be used to game them and they will always be lagging behind.
Some experts think that the change could improve the effectiveness of the search engine. Ray says that it is going to restore the way things used to be. “But we have to see what happens.”
The spike in domain squatting is one of the reasons why the reputation of Google Search has been damaged recently. “People can spin up these sites really easily,” says SEO expert Gareth Boyd, who runs the digital marketing firm Forte Analytica. “It’s been a big issue.” According to Barnes, he has created similar sites in the past, though he says he does not do it anymore.
The company has been working on an update since the beginning of the year. More broadly, the company has been working on ways to fix low-quality content in search, including AI-generated spam, since 2022. “We’ve been aware of the problem,” Nayak says. Time is needed to develop these changes effectively.