Google Spam Algorithm Update 2024: Protecting Your Site from Penalties

You might have seen news like ”Google has released a new spam update for search” from time to time. What does this mean? It’s all about dealing with spam content. No one likes to deal with spam content while searching for information on the web. 

What do we all do upon encountering spam emails? Delete it; end of story. But what about dealing with such content or websites on search engines? That’s exactly what Google spam update algorithms are designed for: penalize them and make the search a lot better.

Speaking about spam algorithms, Google has launched several such of them over time. The Google Spam Update June 2024 is one such whose primary objective is to refine search results by targeting low-quality, spam content, websites may be hit by Google Core update, which could harm your site’s visibility. In this blog, we’ll talk about these algorithms, highlight the various policies, and how to ensure your website doesn’t get penalized.

Going beyond the spam

Google Spam Algorithm Update is all about introducing significant changes in SEO, improving the quality of search results, and refining the user experience. With each change, search engines become smarter and more sophisticated, prefer ranking high-quality content, and penalizing spam. According to the official spam policy documentation by Google, “Spam is web content that’s designed to deceive users or manipulate search systems to rank highly”. 

If your website has content created through questionable strategies, this June 2024 spam update can result in flagging any issues, affect web traffic and revenue, and above all, lower search engine rankings. So what the Google spam update does is crack down on low-quality spammy websites, and links and improve the overall search experience for users. Taking down and penalizing such websites helps people find more relevant useful contents that serve their purpose. So yeah, introducing such spam algorithm updates is the right step in digital marketing.

Decoding The Spam Practices

Once you realize there is spam content on your website, it is important to identify and update it to avoid a negative impact on your SEO activities. Some of the common spam practices described in the Google Spam Algorithm Update policy document are as follows:

Site reputation abuse

Site reputation abuse means when third-party web pages are published without the involvement or oversight of the first party or the host website. The purpose of this approach is to leverage the first party’s ranking signals and manipulate search engine rankings.

Thin Content

As the name implies, contents that offer little to zero value to the user are thin page contents. These pages are added to capture traffic and manipulate rankings without offering anything. Webpages with few sentences or irrelevant information, ad-riddled pages, etc are some examples.

Cloaking

Another search engine ranking manipulative technique is cloaking. This deceptive practice involves showing different content to search engines than what is shown to users. What happens here is that the page aims to appear more relevant to search engines to get higher rankings.

Keyword Stuffing

This one doesn’t need much of an explanation. Cannibalization of the keywords and stuffing web pages with keywords to increase search engine rankings is considered spamming. Not only this makes the content unreadable but it also results in getting penalized. In case you forgot, almost all the recent Google algorithms are smart enough to detect excessive keyword usage. Trying to add relevant keywords and maintaining a natural keyword density will help in the long run.

Expired domain abuse

Another common spam strategy is purchasing expired domain names, hosting low-quality content, and repurposing them to manipulate search engine rankings. Posting affiliate content on a website that formerly belonged to a government agency is such an example of this.

Scraping

Taking content from another website and hosting it to manipulate search engine rankings is scraping. Some examples include republishing content from other websites without adding anything new or not citing the source, reproducing content without any value to the user, etc.

How to Protect Your Site from spam

Now that you have learned to identify the various spamming strategies, let’s address the ways to protect your site from getting penalized by Google spam updates in the first place. If you ask us how to get started, our short answer would be to adapt to the ever-evolving search engine algorithms. Fortunately, here are some effective strategies that you can use to keep your site free of spam content and enhance search rankings:

Perform Regular Backlink Audits

Doing regular backlink auditing helps identify and remove any sort of spam links existing on your website. Instead of resorting to spammy links, it’s always better to earn high-quality ones from reputable sites.

Prioritize creating quality content

If your website content is original, relevant, and offers users immense value, then your website rankings will skyrocket for sure. Google always prefers to rank well-researched web content, which should be undetectable ai written content and precisely written for your target audience.

Comply with Google’s Guidelines

The most logical way to stay clear of spam content is to comply with Google’s search guidelines. Complying with the Google Spam update June 2024 not only helps prevent lower rankings or getting penalized but it assures that your content is relevant and of high quality. Getting penalized by Google for non-compliance is not something easy to recover from as it requires significant changes from your marketing side.

Get Started With GTECH

In the ongoing battle of purging spam content from search engines, Google’s June 2024 spam update does make a significant difference in identifying such practices and implementing effective strategies to ensure that relevant high-quality contents are maintained and delivered to users upon searching for information. The most important thing to ensure is to not get penalized for having spam content.

However, this can be resolved by staying compliant with Google’s guidelines and focusing on creating genuine content that will help improve your search rankings in the long run. To learn more about this algorithm or if you are worried about losing your rankings, partner with GTECH and stay ahead of Google’s updates. Providing the top SEO services in Dubai, our professional marketing experts will ensure your website and content remain compliant and continue to thrive.

Get in touch with us today to learn more. So, what’s your take on the Google Spam Algorithm Update? Let us know in the comments.