Becomes this:
“Our policies cover common spam practices, but Google may act against any type of spam practices we detect.”
The new sentence above is kind of redundant, but it shows a conscious effort to consolidate similar activities into a single category of activity.
Concept Of Spam Abuse
The next change is to increase the use of the word “abuse” in the new version of the spam policies. Abuse is a word that describes a harmful activity. In the case of SEO, Google may be using that word because it describes an activity that intentionally deceives users and search engines.
The old version used the word 11 times and the new version uses that word 17 times. It’s a relatively minor change but it significantly heightens the concept of spam being a form of abuse.
Here are two examples of how Google added the concept of abuse:
The word “doorways” is now “doorway abuse”
The phrase “Hidden text and links” is now Hidden text and links abuse”
There are other changes to the documentation where they add the word “abuse” and what’s interesting about that is this is a change to how a concept (abuse) is introduced to make a series of seemingly different things related. This helps reader comprehension because “hidden text” and “doorways” are now connected to each other in the concept of “abuse” in the sense of spam.
Improved Conciseness
Another change which should always be considered in a content refresh is to make phrases more concise.
Google changed the following text:
“Google uses links as a factor in determining the relevancy of web pages. Any links that are intended to manipulate rankings in Google Search results may be considered link spam. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.”
It’s now significantly shorter:
“Link spam is the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings.”
Big difference, right? I really like that change because someone probably looked at that original three sentences and considered what the core message was that was trying to get through that thicket of three sentences.
If you read the original three sentences it’s kind of a lot of information that doesn’t really stick in the mind. Considering whether a series of sentences communicate effectively is a good way to approach a content rewrite. Just read it and ask, “what does this mean?” and if the answer is shorter then consider writing that in place of the sentences.
Improved Topic Communication: Machine-Generated Traffic
This next change dramatically improves the machine-generated traffic section because it removes a part that makes it about Google and makes it more about a definition of machine generated traffic.
These sentences:
“Machine-generated traffic consumes resources and interferes with our ability to best serve users. Examples of automated traffic include:”
Are now this:
“Machine-generated traffic (also called automated traffic) refers to the practice of sending automated queries to Google. This includes scraping…”
The part about consuming resources is still there but it’s now moved toward the end of that section.
There are other instances in the documentation were two sentences were shortened into one that gets to the point more directly, concise.
For example, the section about Misleading Functionality replaces two sentences with one sentence that defines what misleading functionality is:
“Misleading functionality refers to the practice of…”
The section about Scraped Content replaced three long sentences with a sentence that defines what scraped content is:
“Scraping refers to the practice of taking content from other sites…”
Content Refresh Versus A Rewrite
The updated spam documentation is not a rewrite but an incremental refresh with some new information. It suggests ways to update your own content by adding new details and making existing information clearer and more concise.
Read the updated documentation:
Spam policies for Google web search
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Shutterstock AI Generator