New Google Update Drop
Google just today dropped a set of new updates: a core update and a spam update.
This is the big one.
It’s about to punish a lot of practices that are common in the SEO industry and sounds like it’s going to change everything.
This article is definitely a hot take (the update was just announced an hour ago as of this writing) but here’s my initial thoughts.
What the update targets
The update is targeting three different things: “expired domain abuse”, “scaled content abuse”, and “site reputation abuse”.
I’ll start with the most interesting.
“Scaled content abuse” aka spamming AI content
I’ve been telling you fools for years: don’t spam AI content on your site.
Every other SEO guru in the world was telling you the opposite, but as usual I was right (in case you’re wondering, no it never gets old).
So there it is.
AI spam is about to get clapped.
Too many gurus were focused on the first order effect of AI: “can a tool detect whether a specific piece of content is AI?”
Obviously the answer at this point is no.
Some AI detectors exist but I haven’t been impressed with any of them. I may have recommended some in the early days but after testing them out for a while I found that they all suck.
Sometimes they label really good human content as AI and other times just changing a few words on obvious AI content gives it a “100% human” rating.
So AI content is hard to detect using tools (but easy to see when reading it obviously).
But when you think about the second order effects of AI it’s easy to see how it’s detectable.