Google updates search engine to demote clickbait

Google plans to make changes to its search engine rankings to promote original content over purely search engine-optimized articles that fail informational or clickbait.

Google dominates the search engine market. According to Statista, it has 83.84% of the global search engine market share in July 2022, ahead of next-runner Bing with 8.88%. This equates to 86.5 billion visits in June 2022 alone, as reported by Similarweb.

This change will roll out to English users worldwide starting next week. Full rollout can take up to two weeks and introduces new site-wide ranking criteria. The search giant says the update will particularly affect results related to online education, entertainment, shopping and technology-related content.

To prepare for this change, Google suggested that authors focus on user-first content and avoid creating content that is purely optimized for search engine rankings. In some cases, if a piece of content can meet some of those criteria, it may currently rank well on Google’s search pages, even if its quality is poor and uninformative. Google says removing this kind of unhelpful content can also help your site rank better.

In a blog post, the company explained that this is part of a broader effort to give people the content they expect. Last year, the company made “thousands of updates” based on quality testing and revamped its search ranking algorithm. A complete list of recommendations can be found on Google’s blog.

Last year, the company specifically targeted product reviews, a content-poor area. In April 2021, the company updated its search rankings to better promote high-quality, authoritative product reviews, as opposed to reviews that offer shallow, regressive, or curated content.

Some key takeaways from the last update include writing reviews from the user’s perspective, including quantitative analysis, and explaining how the product under review differs from its competitors. A full list of guidelines has been posted on Google’s blog.

IT World Canada has reached out to Google for comment and will update this article when we hear back.