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Google is changing its search results to weed out SEO spam

Amid complaints about its search results declining in quality, Google is tweaking its algorithms to do a better job of weeding out spammy or automated content. The company says the ranking updates, arriving in May, will “keep the lowest-quality content out of search.”

The company says the changes will send more traffic to “helpful and high-quality sites.” When combined with the updates from two years ago, Google estimates the revision will reduce spammy, unoriginal search results by 40 percent. “This update involves refining some of our core ranking systems to help us better understand if webpages are unhelpful, have a poor user experience or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people,” Google product management director Elizabeth Tucker wrote. “We’ll now consider very low-value, third-party content produced primarily for ranking purposes and without close oversight of a website owner to be spam,” Tucker wrote.

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