Google announced this week that it’s making some changes to tackle the problem of spam content appearing in searches. Users have increasingly complained that the search engine has been overrun by a barrage of low-quality content created purely to game Google search algorithms, instead of providing actual information.

Those changes would have been helpful for Seth McDaniel about a year ago. Around then, his newly adopted rescue dog, Fella, was throwing up and he couldn’t figure out why.

“And so then I was Googling around it, every single website that I was coming across, it was saying like, ‘Oh, it’s a terrible thing when your dog vomits,’ and then it’ll just like go on how awful it is like for your carpet and for the dog,” he said.

It was a lot of what he calls “word vomit” — about dog vomit. McDaniel works in marketing himself, so he knows this trick.

“The more that you can keyword stuff relevant search phrases that people might be Googling, then the higher your article is going to appear,” he said.

That’s the art of search engine optimization, or SEO. Google’s search algorithm considers factors like relevance, authority or how often a site is linked to, per Chirag Shah, an information science professor at the University of Washington.

“There are all kinds of tricks that SEO plays, you know — some of them are desirable, some of them are just deceiving,” he said.

On the good side, for instance, would be a reputable news organization optimizing a headline. On the not so good side would be AI-generated content summarized from other sites to steal their clicks, per Garrett Johnson, a professor of digital marketing at Boston University. 

“The problem is that generative AI makes long-form content easier to produce,” he said.

Now, Google says it will downrank websites that produce, say, thousands of “articles” a day. It will also penalize sites that buy and repurpose recently expired domains or those that sell space for spam.

Google still dominates search, but ChatGPT is a threat, argues Scott Kessler, a technology analyst with Third Bridge.

“The search marketplace may very well look pretty different in a couple of years,” he said.

Dog owner Seth McDaniel found a workaround. He started adding “Reddit” to his queries to find answers written by humans.

“And the very first answer that popped up was just, ‘Oh, he probably gets hungry in the morning. And that causes his stomach acids to, you know, flare up or whatever.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, well, I’ll just feed him earlier,'” he said.

Look at that: Both the dog and word vomit problem solved.