In a move to provide higher-quality search results, Google has once again changed its algorithms. This time, the tuning aims to weed out bad content — and it impacts nearly 12 percent of all Google’s millions of search queries each month.
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More than a subtle tweak that most users probably wouldn’t notice, the changes warranted an official Google blog post to announce and explain what’s going on. That task fell to Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, and Matt Cutts, principal engineer at Google.
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This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites — sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other web sites, or sites that are just not very useful, Singhal and Cutts wrote. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites — sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis, and so on.
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Anticipating the Impact
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Of course, Google can’t make a major change to its algorithm without a significant impact on site rankings. Google anticipates the change will cause some sites to rank higher and some to rank lower.
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Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful web sites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem, Singhal and Cutts wrote. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.
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Nixing Content Spam
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Google has been heavily criticized in the past several months for the prevalence of high-ranking content spam. Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence, said a there’s a debate raging about what this includes, but Google has said it includes scraper sites that compile content from third-party sources to drive page views.
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It also, as a practical matter, includes many ‘content farms,’ which use low-paid freelancers to quickly generate articles for…