Google has made some major changes to their algorithm with both the (not so) Helpful Content Update and 2024 Core Update. They also reduced free data storage limits, increased prices for data storage and deleted a huge amount of data from their servers. Google also invested heavily in AI and rolled out several AI-related products. What do all these have in common, and how does it affect your business? That’s what we are going to look at in this month’s blog.
The 50K-Foot View
All search engines use complicated math formulas to analyze and rank websites and individual webpages for specific search phrases. Important factors include content volume, frequency of updates and links from 3rd party websites. To oversimplify it, Google and other search engines see sites that are narrowly focused, have a large amount of content, are well-organized and cross-linked as being better than small, static websites with very few links. This worked well until AI came along.
With the advent of AI content generation, huge amounts of content are being added to websites to boost their rankings in search engines. Many website owners adopted the more-is-better approach to content generation and began flooding their sites with hundreds of new pages per month.
Drowning in AI Content
It is estimated that AI has generated more image and text content over the last five years than all of history. Google’s AI will tell you that about 10% of all internet content is AI-generated, and as much as 57% of all internet content is generated with the assistance of AI. Image generating AIs created more images in the last two years than photographers created over the last 150 years. This is a huge problem for several reasons.
It is undeniable that humans can produce significantly more content with the help of AI. The major problem is the proverbial firehose of raw AI content that is being posted to websites. This mass-produced content is riddled with factual errors, regurgitates the same basic facts/opinions and often has very little value to human readers.
As consumers of content, we are being forced to sift through more of it to find any original thought. Beyond that, our critical thinking skills are being pushed to their limits as AI generates very persuasive, well-written but factually wrong content as well as nearly perfect, but misleading photos and videos. In the worst-case scenarios, AI-generated content is being used to mislead, defraud and damage the reputation of people and brands.
Google Can’t Afford Data Storage
Google has recently had some major shifts in their data storage systems driven primarily by the cost of maintaining their data storage centers under the weight of the vast quantities of data being generated. You may have noticed this play out in several ways:
- Your free data storage limits have dropped
- The cost associated with your paid data storage has increased
- YouTube ad revenue has been cut
- YouTube Premium has increased their prices dramatically
- Google announced that they have deleted the cached copies of websites.
- Google has prioritized its own AI-generated content in organic search results
- Google has expanded the ways you can pay to receive priority placement in organic search results.
All of this is because Google needs to find ways to decrease costs and increase revenue while the amount of data that they need to contend with is growing rapidly.
How Google is Fighting Back Against AI
Going back to the Helpful Content Update, one of Google’s goals was to identify content that was deemed to be “low quality” or “underperforming.” To make these identifications, Google used two tools: AI content detection and Google Analytics data. When Google tags a page as either low-quality or detects that there is little to no-traffic to a page, it gets removed from their search index. This has dramatically reduced the number of pages that Google has to analyze and store in their index.
A side effect of this is that links from the removed pages to pages on your website are no longer counted. The net result is that your in-bound link score drops, which causes your website to drop in organic search placements and creates a downward spiral.
Caught in the Crossfire
In an effort to penalize content spammers for overproducing AI content, Google decided to widen the “not helpful” tag from individual pages to entire websites. When an undisclosed percentage of pages on your website are flagged as either “low-quality” or “underperforming,” your entire website is flagged and penalized. This means that you will be excluded from organic search results and traffic to your website will crash.
Mixed Messages on How to Recover
Google’s SEO team has explicitly stated that pruning your website (removing underperforming pages) is a bad idea; however, experimental data by SEO experts shows that updating then resubmitting or removing pages listed as “Crawled – not indexed” in your Google Search Console will improve your SEO results.
How Grapevine Can Help
At this time, we are recommending clients review their Google Search Console for problematic pages, update and resubmit them to Google. Prune content that Google rejects after being updated. Move the content of the pruned pages into other, higher-level pages to improve their “helpful content” score. If you have any questions about this process or would like to learn more, reach out to us at wowme@grapeinc.com.
About Grapevine Communications
Grapevine Communications is a full-service creative marketing agency celebrating 22 years of success on the Suncoast of Florida. To learn more about what we do, visit our services page or call us at 941-351-0024.
