Google today was introduced new tools for website owners, including those with social media sites and discussion forums, who want to better rank their content in Google search results. The feature follows Google’s reprioritization of user-generated web content over SEO-optimized spam, which has more and more are a problem in today’s modern web. In May, Google first rolled out a new “Outlook” search filter that would highlight posts from discussion boards like Reddit, Q&A sites like Quora and social media platforms in search results. The feature, which first launched on mobile, rolled out to desktop users earlier this month along with other search changes.
The company also said its ranking algorithm is being updated to push more of these first-hand perspectives higher in search results so they’re easier to find.
With the new tools, Google is giving sites that host first-person perspectives the ability to tell the search engine how their data is structured so that their content appears both accurately and “as comprehensively as possible” in Search Results of Google, the company explains. .
For example, with the new Bookmark profile page, any site where creators publish content will be able to display their creator profiles directly in Google Search results, including information such as their name, handle, profile photo, number of followers or popularity of their content. Both Google Insights and Discussions and Forums can make use of this type of markup.
Image Credits: Google
Meanwhile, the DiscussionForumPost markup will help Google better recognize conversations originating from any online forum or discussion site on the web. While Google can already identify a number of top forums, such as Reddit, in Search Results, this markup will allow other, smaller sites to be better indexed, categorized and ranked by Google’s new algorithm, as well.
Image Credits: Google
This includes Q&A sites, which have their own markingas general discussion forum.
To support website owners in implementing these changes, Google is updating Search Console with new reports that will show items such as errors, warnings and valid items related to their flagged pages. Both features will also be available on Test enriched results so website owners can test and validate any markup changes.
Google’s changes to the way it categorizes and ranks content come at a time when there are a growing number of complaints about the search engine’s usefulness.
While Google arguably outperforms many of its competitors in search, its results are now often filled with SEO-optimized, machine-written content, and there is a real fear that as AI advances take over, this problem will only get worse. In this case: this post running on X today describes an “SEO heist” that stole 3.6 million search traffic from a competitor by creating articles based on the competitor’s sitemap using artificial intelligence. While it’s a horrible, worst-case scenario for AI (and unverified at that), it’s generating buzz because it exemplifies what many believe will be the end of Google: bogus AI-written garbage prioritized over work; the thoughts and opinions of real people.
Whether this example will become a reality – the proverbial canary in the coal mine – remains to be seen.
But that’s exactly what Google’s ranking changes aim to address, as the search engine tries to better index, display and categorize forums and social sites in search results.
Of course, Google’s experiments with next-generation search don’t end there. The company is also testing its own AI answer engine, Search Generative Experience, and recently announced an experiment that will allow users to comment on webpages with notes — likely a barrier to Reddit’s choice to lock its site behind an API to not source for AI training data without payment. If commenting takes off, Google will have essentially built its own Reddit right on Google, but the feature is still an opt-in experiment for now.
