5 new quality factors that Google expects from websites – How does it affect tourism?

On January 23, 2025, Google updated the “Search Quality Raters” PDF, adding 11 new pages with specifications on what they expect from a high-quality site and what should be categorized as low quality.

The guidelines provided in this document are not direct indications of ranking improvements or drops, but they do reflect what they expect from websites. After collecting enough data, these factors could eventually influence rankings.

That’s why I recommend paying attention to the changes made in this document. Marie Haynes reviewed the changes, so let’s go through them one by one to see what’s new.

Filler Content

The document clearly explains what this means:

A crafting tutorial page with instructions on how to make a basic craft and lots of unhelpful “filler” at the top, such as commonly known facts about the supplies needed or other non-crafting information. [1]

This is a common issue that users frequently complain about. It also stems from an outdated tactic suggesting that more words increase the chances of ranking higher.

Nowadays, we need to focus on the reader’s experience. Wasting their time before they can find the answer is now considered a sign of low quality. It’s true that many websites rely on this strategy to generate revenue, so it remains to be seen how this update will impact them.

Regarding tourism content, I recommend keeping the following points in mind:

1. Stay focused on the main topic. If the content is titled “The X Best Fishing Spots in Buenos Aires,” it probably doesn’t make sense to discuss the history of different fishing locations.
2. The content should be practical and solve the user’s problem as quickly as possible.
3. Place the answer to the main question as high as possible within the content.

Scaled Content Abuse

This is a new section that directly targets large-scale or mass content generation. Typically, the result is low in value and originality. To be clear, this is aimed directly at those using generative AI to produce content.

Here’s what it says:

Creating an abundance of content with little effort or originality with no editing or manual curation is often the defining attribute of spammy websites.

Scaled content abuse is a spam practice described in the Google Search Web Spam Policies. Scaled content abuse occurs when many pages are generated for the purpose of primarily benefiting the website owner and not helping users. This practice is typically focused on creating large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value for website visitors compared to other similar pages on the web, no matter how it’s created.

Examples of scaled content abuse include:

• Using automated tools (generative AI or otherwise) as a low-effort way to produce many pages that add little-to-no value for website visitors as compared to other pages on the web on the same topic.
• Scraping feeds, search results, or other content to generate many pages (including through automated transformations like synonymizing, translating, or other obfuscation techniques), where little value is provided to website visitors
• Stitching or combining content from different web pages without adding value
• Creating multiple sites with the intent of hiding the scaled nature of the content
• Creating many pages where the content makes little or no sense to a reader but contains search keywords

Pages and websites made up of content created at scale with no original content or added value for users, should be rated Lowest, no matter how they are created. Even if you are unsure of the method of creation, e.g. whether or not the page is created using generative AI tools, you should still use the Lowest rating when you strongly suspect scaled content abuse after looking at several pages on the website. [2]

In practice, what Google (and common sense) is asking here is that we do not publish content exactly as AI generates it. Additionally, it warns against using AI-generated content simply as a way to rapidly grow the number of pages.

Google has no issues with the use of generative AI (as we will see in the next section), but the content should be validated and enriched with firsthand information by the writer, editor, or responsible party.

Regarding tourism content, I would recommend the following:

1. Obviously, do not publish content exactly as AI generates it. By nature, this content is low quality—not because it is poorly written, but because it adds nothing new.
2. Use AI-generated content as a base, but add firsthand experiences whenever possible. In the tourism industry, this is usually not a problem.
3. Related to the previous point, if you’re going to use generative AI, use it for content about the location where your business operates. For example, if you run a travel agency in Iguazú Falls, don’t use AI to generate content about the “best tango houses in Buenos Aires.”

AI-Generated Content

There are new mentions regarding the use of generative AI. Google is not against it, but it emphasizes the importance of human effort in creating something useful for users based on AI-generated content.

For example, it first provides the following definition of generative AI:

Generative AI is a type of machine learning (ML) model that can take what it has learned from the examples it has been provided to create new content, such as text, images, music, and code. Learn more here. Different tools leverage these models to create generative AI content. Generative AI can be a helpful tool for content creation, but like any tool, it can also be misused. [3]

Then, it mentions the effort required to generate content as a quality factor:

Effort: Consider the extent to which a human being actively worked to create satisfying content. Effort may be direct, such as a person translating a poem from one language to another. Effort may go into designing page functionality or building systems that power a webpage, such as the creation of a page that offers machine translation as a service to users. On the other hand, the automatic creation of thousands of pages by running existing freely available content through existing translation software without any oversight, manual curation, etc., would not be considered to have effort. [4]

The document mentions sites like this one and this one as negative examples of paraphrasing, lack of originality, and the absence of additional value for the reader.

This issue has existed long before generative AI, but since content creation is now easier, Google has reinforced the idea that, at the end of the day, to achieve sustainable results over time, you need to create high-quality content.

Regarding tourism content, I would recommend the following:

1. The tourism industry, thanks to its specialization, does not need to generate content without added value or firsthand experience. Take advantage of this benefit, which not everyone has.
2. Add any additional resources you can; one valuable asset is original photographs. This helps demonstrate that you are actually in the location you’re discussing.

Using Expired Domains to Rank

The issue here relates to purchasing domains with an established history (including past content and external links) to quickly gain rankings.

In practice, this becomes a problem when acquiring a domain that has nothing to do with the main topic, either in its name or its historical content.

The documentation provides the following example:

At the time of this example, the URL for this example was ruralschools.org. Previously ruralschools.org was owned by an organization called Organizations Concerned for Rural Education (OCRE). Using the Internet Archive, we can see what the page used to look like.

Currently the content is about the Hong Kong lottery.

People may be genuinely expecting a website about rural schools for this URL. Consider URLs to be misleading or deceptive when the URL looks like a high quality government agency, school, charity or otherwise trusted source but the content is low quality and completely unrelated, e.g. low quality content about medical products, loans, lottery tickets, gambling, etc. [5]

In the tourism industry, the advice is: do not use expired domains that have nothing to do with the main topic of your website.

Site Reputation Abuse

On this topic, Google has already launched updates affecting sites like Forbes Advisor. Now, it is also included in the guidelines for Quality Raters.

Websites that publish content for commercial purposes with the intent to leverage the domain’s established authority to rank in searches where they normally wouldn’t, fall into this category. For example, a section on a completely unrelated topic to the main site, accompanied by signals indicating that these are advertiser-sponsored spaces.

Google provides the following example:

This is an article published on a news website. The top of the page has a Sponsored Content banner.

The page goes on to disclose:

“Articles attributed to this byline are authored by paying advertisers. The editorial team did not contribute to these pieces, and the opinions expressed do not necessarily represent those of the editorial staff. Refer to our partner statement to better understand the nature of the relationship.

The sponsor retains responsibility for the content and holds the copyright to their material”

This page qualifies as site reputation abuse because the content on the page is produced by a third party (a supplement maker) and published on this news website to inherit the reputation of the news publisher, even though the news publisher is not responsible for this content.

In addition to site reputation abuse, there are also potentially misleading and untrustworthy aspects to this article that warrant a Lowest rating:

• Even though there is a disclaimer, the content could be mistaken for an article written by the newspaper.
• The article appears to be an independent review for a supplement, but is actually written by the producer of the supplement.
• There is a clear conflict of interest, making this an untrustworthy source of information. [6]

Regarding tourism, it is unlikely that a site in this industry would be at risk for engaging in these practices. However, exceptions might exist, for example, if you run a very large site and attempt to expand into other verticals that have little to do with your main topic.

As of today, it appears that this type of content is only being de-indexed from Google rather than impacting the entire site. However, this is a relatively new development, and we need to understand its full impact. It is also important to observe the alternatives that websites and advertisers are exploring in response to this issue.

Conclusion

Generative AI is an excellent tool; there is no point in denying that or pretending we don’t use it. Personally, I use it daily for grammar corrections and content translation.

However, we must be thoughtful in how we use it and remember that if we want sustainable search engine rankings, we cannot rely entirely on AI to ensure content quality—content that will ultimately be consumed by real people.

References:

Search quality raters guidelines (January 22, 2025), PDF

• [1] Google. (2025). Search quality raters guidelines (January 22, 2025), p.60
• [2] Google. (2025). Search quality raters guidelines (January 22, 2025), p. 42
• [3] Google. (2025). Search quality raters guidelines (January 22, 2025), p. 9
• [4] Google. (2025). Search quality raters guidelines (January 22, 2025), p. 21
• [5] Google. (2025). Search quality raters guidelines (January 22, 2025), p. 56
• [6] Google. (2025). Search quality raters guidelines (January 22, 2025), p. 57