Google today launched new tools for website owners, including those who run social media sites and forums, who want to better promote their content in Google's search results. The feature follows Google's re-prioritization of user-generated web content over SEO spam, which has increasingly become an issue on today's modern web.
In May of this year, Google debuted a new "opinion" search filter that highlights posts from discussion boards such as Reddit, Q&A sites such as Quora, and social media platforms in search results. The feature first rolled out on mobile and was 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 first-hand opinions higher in search results, making them easier to find.
With the new tool, Google allows websites with a first-person perspective to indicate the structure of their data to search engines, so that their content can be accurately and "as completely as possible" displayed in Google search results.
For example, with the new "ProfilePage" tag, any website where a creator publishes content will be able to display the creator's profile directly in Google search results, including information such as their name, profile photo, number of followers, or the popularity of the content. Google's "Views" feature and "Discussions & Forums" feature can use this tag.
Meanwhile, the DiscussionForumPosting tag will help Google better identify conversations originating from any online forum or discussion site on the web. While Google can already identify some high-traffic forums (like Reddit) in search results, this tagging will allow other smaller sites to be better indexed, categorized and ranked by Google's new algorithm.
To support website owners in implementing these changes, Google is updating its Search Console with new reporting capabilities that display errors, warnings, and valid items related to tagged pages. Both features will also be available in RichResultsTest to allow site owners to test and validate any markup changes.
The changes to how Google categorizes and ranks content come amid growing complaints about the search engine's usefulness.
While Google's search results are arguably better than many of its competitors, they are now often filled with SEO-optimized machine-written content, and with the advancement of artificial intelligence, there are concerns that this problem will only get worse. For example: This post circulating on X today describes an "SEO heist" that stole 3.6 million search traffic from competitors by using artificial intelligence to create articles based on a large number of similar competitor sitemaps.
While this is a scary, worst-case scenario for AI (and an unproven one at that), it's still generating buzz because it exemplifies what many see as the end of Google: fake garbage written by AI that takes precedence over the work, thoughts, and opinions of real people.
This is exactly what Google's ranking changes are about, as the search engine tries to better index, display and categorize forums and social networking sites in search results.
Of course, Google's attempts at next-generation search don't stop there. The company is also testing its own AI-generated answer engine, Search Generative Experience, and recently announced an experiment that allows users to add annotations to web pages — most likely to prevent Reddit from choosing to lock its site behind an API and thus avoid becoming an unpaid source of AI training data. If the annotation feature comes to fruition, Google will build its own Reddit directly on Google, but for now the feature remains an optional experiment.