Scaled content abuse is a Google spam policy violation. It applies when many pages are generated primarily to manipulate search rankings and not to help users. Google introduced the policy in March 2024.
At a glance
- Started
- March 5, 2024
- Completed
- policy remains in force
- Type
- spam policy
- Affects
- many pages produced mainly to manipulate rankings, however they are created
- Confirmed by
- yes
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What does the policy cover?
Google writes that the abuse typically involves large amounts of unoriginal content with little to no value for users, no matter how it is created. The policy covers automation, human effort, or a mix of both. Google’s examples include AI-generated pages without added value, scraped content that is only rewritten or synonymized, and pages with incoherent, keyword-stuffed text. Creating several sites to hide the scale of such content is also listed.
Is AI content against the policy?
Google’s announcement from March 5, 2024 says the company has long had a policy against using automation to generate low-quality content at scale, and that it strengthened the policy to cover content produced at scale whether automation, humans or a combination are involved. The decisive factor is the purpose and value of the pages. Pages published in volume to rank, with nothing useful added, fall under it.
Sites that violate spam policies may rank lower or not appear at all. Detection runs through automated systems such as SpamBrain and through human review that can lead to a manual action.
- Google announces the completion of Caffeine, its new web indexing system. Google says it delivers 50 percent fresher results than the previous index.Source: googleblog.blogspot.com
- Google announces a ranking change against low-quality and copied content that noticeably affects 11.8% of queries. Google later refers to the system by its nickname “Panda”.Source: googleblog.blogspot.com
- Google improves how it decides when to favour recent results. According to Google the change affects roughly 35 percent of searches and builds on Caffeine.Source: googleblog.blogspot.com
- Google launches a change that looks at page layout. Pages with little content and many ads above the fold may rank lower.Source: developers.google.com
- Google announces a change against webspam, later nicknamed “Penguin”. It affects about 3.1% of English queries and roughly 3% of German queries.Source: developers.google.com
- Hummingbird, which Google describes as a major improvement to its overall ranking systems.Source: developers.google.com
- Panda becomes part of the core ranking systems. Google now lists it among its retired systems.Source: developers.google.com
- Google launches RankBrain, the first deep learning system used in Search. It relates the words in a query to real-world concepts.Source: blog.google
- Google starts rolling out the mobile-friendly update, boosting mobile-friendly pages in mobile search results. The industry unofficially calls it “Mobilegeddon”.Source: developers.google.com
- Penguin becomes part of the core algorithm and now works in real time. Before that, the list of affected sites was only refreshed periodically.Source: developers.google.com
- Google introduces neural matching. The system helps relate queries to pages through underlying concepts.Source: blog.google
- Launch of SpamBrain, Google’s AI-based spam prevention system. Google says it identified nearly six times more spam sites in 2021 than in 2020.Source: developers.google.com
- Google applies BERT to ranking and featured snippets. At launch it affects about one in ten English searches in the US.Source: blog.google
- Google presents passage ranking, which can assess individual passages of a page for a query. Google expects it to improve 7 percent of queries.Source: blog.google
- First product reviews update. It rewards in-depth product reviews and initially covers English-language reviews only.Source: developers.google.com
- Google introduces MUM, a model trained across 75 languages. Google calls it 1,000 times more powerful than BERT.Source: blog.google
- First link spam update. It aims to identify and nullify link spam across multiple languages and rolls out over two weeks.Source: developers.google.com
- With the helpful content update, Google aims to show more original, helpful content written for people.Source: status.search.google.com
- December 2022 helpful content update. Google says it improves the classifier and works globally in all languages.Source: status.search.google.com
- The product reviews update becomes the reviews update. Google says it now covers reviews of products, services and other things.Source: status.search.google.com
- September 2023 helpful content update. Google says it improves the classifier again.Source: status.search.google.com
- November 2023 reviews update. As the reviews system is now improved at a regular pace, Google no longer posts future updates on the Status Dashboard.Source: status.search.google.com
- The helpful content system becomes part of the core ranking systems. Google now lists it among its retired systems.Source: developers.google.com
- Three new spam policies against expired domain abuse, scaled content abuse and site reputation abuse. The March 2024 spam update launches the same day.Source: developers.google.com
- The site reputation abuse policy takes effect. Google had given site owners time to prepare since March.Source: developers.google.com
- In the US antitrust case against Google, the court describes Navboost as a signal that memorises which documents users click for a query. This is a court document, not a Google publication.Source: storage.courtlistener.com
- Google tightens the site reputation abuse policy. First-party involvement does not change the assessment when third-party content exploits the host site’s ranking signals.Source: developers.google.com
A selection, not a complete list. Core and spam updates since November 2021 have their own timeline. Names such as Florida (2003), Pigeon (2014), Possum (2016), Fred (2017) and Medic (2018), as well as Payday Loan and EMD, come from the SEO industry. Their dates rest only on trade press reports and posts by Google employees on X; Google has not published a dated page about them. Last checked: .
Example
A site publishes 5,000 city pages generated from one template with only the city name swapped (constructed example).
Sources
- Spam policies for Google web search – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies – Google Search Central Blog, 2024-03-05developers.google.com
- Google Search spam updates – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- New ways we're tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search – Google Blog, 2024-03-05blog.google
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