How the Use of AI in Google Updates Has Affected the Ranking of Informational Content

2023 was an important year for search engine optimization, with the introduction of artificial intelligence features on landing pages and updates to Google's algorithms that further suppress spam content and bad links.

Some may feel that things are moving too fast, and it has become difficult to define a solid SEO strategy with so many changes. Our company Elit-Web has been working on the optimization of various online projects for many years, and now our specialists are observing changes in the way Google crawls, sorts and displays search results. In this post, we'll tell you how artificial intelligence has changed Google's ranking system and talk about what can be done to keep a website from losing its positions.

In their documentation, Google representatives repeatedly remind that the goal of the largest search engine is to help the users quickly find those pages that will be useful to them. For this, complex machine learning models are used, which help to create certain signals. And they are further used in ranking algorithms. Essentially, a signal is a way of marking content as having high or low value to users. In fact, these markers mean "useful/unuseful" and are crucial to a site's ranking in search results.

Indeed, if you critically evaluate the content of pages that are ranked higher by Google's algorithms, you can see that they are more useful to people than those that are ranked lower. Therefore, when we strive for our site to have high positions in the search, first of all, it is worth looking at how much its content meets the expectations of consumers.

As you know, Google has been using AI to improve its algorithms since 2016, after the launch of Google Penguin 4.0. AI-powered Bard's launch announcement says the chatbot combines the power, intelligence and creativity of language models with "a breadth of global knowledge." That is, we can see that the ideas of integrating AI with search algorithms have evolved significantly during this time. But throughout this period, we have observed one consistent trend — the more Google uses artificial intelligence systems, the more important it is for us to match the sites to the expectations of real users.

The company has repeatedly given us recommendations for creating content that is primarily focused on people. The update, which was released on April 19, 2023, was not an exception, but rather continued this tradition. Its essence is that another section has appeared in the guide to creating useful content — about convenience for users.

Someone may ask how it is possible to algorithmically measure how useful and attractive this or that material is to people. But we would like to remind you that for the first time Google talked about the use of algorithms for assessing the quality of content back in 2011 when the Panda algorithm was released. When it was first released, the SEO community recognized that sites with poor quality content were losing their rankings significantly.

So, if they started marking content created for machines 12 years ago, now the technologies have improved, and Google algorithms can now interpret a huge number of signals. They learned to determine the usefulness, relevance, and depth of information and adjust rankings accordingly. In addition, data on how people interact with the search engine is used to evaluate the relevance of search results. For this, the company uses the experience of about 16,000 people.

You can speculate theoretically about how this happens, but finally, we convinced that the algorithms are designed to encourage only useful content that meets Google's recommendations.

If after April 2023, you started to notice that the site's search results went down, then it is quite likely that the updated algorithms mark the content of the pages of your web resource as average in quality. Yes, the information you provided can be useful. But, most likely, this is not the best option to demonstrate to users.

If a significant amount of information materials is marked as "texts of average quality", the SEO specialists will face a drop in the site's ranking. In the past, they would have tried to turn things around with on-page SEO or link building, but now those efforts will most likely be futile. After all, content of average quality serves a useful purpose, but does not deserve a high rating.

Although the question of the usefulness of the informational component of the site is much broader, today we are talking about what the spring update of Google's algorithms brought. In this regard, we would like to remind you that E-E-A-T and user experience should now be placed in the centre.

Experienced experts have already noticed that in December 2022, another parameter — Experience — was added to the E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) formula of relevant content in Google's recommendations. That is, priority is given to pages with expert content, i.e. created by authors who have used this or that product themselves. These criteria are even more important for sites dealing with health, finance, or other YMYL topics.

But the E-E-A-T formula is only part of the equation. Over the years, specialists have been able to achieve high results in SEO promotion if they demonstrated adherence to these criteria. However, now another condition has appeared. Today, it's been confirmed that one of the downsides of pages that struggle to promote is that they don't serve the needs of users as well.

Explaining what is the essence of this principle and what is its novelty, Google refers to the documentation devoted to analysis of page usability for the user. At the same time, experts have repeatedly reminded that if we want to succeed in working with the search engine, we need to take many factors into account.

Many of the pages affected by the algorithm update contain information that is really only needed to show search engines that the content on the site is relevant. They are useless to a real person. Such "optimization" is already easy to recognize today with the help of AI.

We are sure that there are many more changes ahead in the search industry due to the introduction of artificial intelligence. However, today we're talking about how Google is already using machine learning to improve the relevance and usefulness of search results. If the traffic is decreasing and you cannot understand why, then there is a high probability that algorithms with the help of AI have determined that the informational content placed on your pages does not fully meet the expectations and needs of users. In this case, it is labelled "medium quality materials".

However, you have every chance to improve the ranking of your pages and get the ranking system to mark them as a useful and relevant result. To do this, it is necessary to remove low-quality content, refine it so that it meets Google's criteria. And then it remains to wait for some time and hope for changes in the ranking.

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