Google will begin penalizing AI-generated content created solely to rank high in its search results.
It's a change that could have a knock-on effect on the quality of what people view online.
As explained by the company in a post on the official blog, the innovation is the result of improvements to the algorithms it uses to classify websites and the contents that populate them.
Specifically, the changes, in force by March, will concern three types of content, or "abuse", as Google calls them, including those whose purpose is the exploitation of artificial intelligence tools to create click-bait news, or clickbait.
The other two are abuse of site reputation and abuse of expired web domains.
In the first case, it may happen that sites with a high reputation host modules in which low quality news produced by third parties is automatically loaded.
“We will consider third-party content of very low value, produced primarily for classification purposes and without careful oversight of the website owner, to be spam,” the note explains.
Occasionally, expired domains are purchased and reused with the primary intent of increasing the search ranking of low-quality or non-original content.
This can lead users to think that the new content is part of the previous site, even when this is not the case.
“Expired domains purchased and reused with the intent to increase rankings will be considered spam. Search helps people with billions of questions every day, but there will always be areas where we can improve. We will continue to work hard to maintain the low-quality content in search at low levels and to show more information created to help people."
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