Google has announced that it has made a huge change in their search algorithm to provide better search results. Unlike most of the tweaks and changes made by the company in their search algorithm earlier, which usually go unnoticed by most users, Google says that this one is big and that it affects 11.8% of their searches.
Google says that with such a major change made in the algorithm, it is inevitable that the rankings of many sites will be affected. In other words, some will go up and some down. However, the company has not named specific sites that would be directly at the receiving end of the made change. Matt Cutts, Google spam fighting team's leader, when asked by Danny Sullivan from searchengineland, answered, “I think people will get the idea of the types of sites we’re talking about.”
Any feedback or information gathered through the Personal Blocklist extension of the Google Chrome browser which was recently launched, has not been used while making this search algorithm change, says Google. However, they have compared the Personal Blocklist gathered information with the sites identified by the new algorithm, and found that 84% of the sites blocked via Chrome extension (Personal Blocklist) were identified by the new algorithm.
Although Google has not given names of the sites that are supposedly going down with the effect of this new ranking algorithm change, it seems quite clear with a little contemplation. The company had earlier announced in January that they will focus on content farms in 2011, and made content farm focused algorithmic changes following the announcement. Hence, content farms that has less original content or those that copy others’ content, are the sites that are being focused on.
Now, sites such as Demand Media, Associated Content and Mahalo etc., that are labeled as content farms come to mind. How will their rankings be impacted with the change in force? To such speculations, Demand Media is defending itself saying that its sites, such as eHow, has high quality content. Well, as to who gets affected by the change or will the latest change really improve Google's ranking quality? Time will tell, as this change that has been put in to action in the US (as of now) gets rolled out in other parts of the world.
Navneet Kaushal
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It's awesome that Google has finally gotten a chance to roll this algorithm out. I remember reading articles as far back as a year or more in which Matt Cutts lamented about content farms gaming the system and the massive amount of work Google was doing on algorithmic changes that would do away with them for the most part.
It's obviously worked. I haven't seen a single eHow page in any searches I've done today. It makes you think twice about the future of SEO though. With page segmentation algorithms in the works DoFollow comments and sidebar link exchanges are likely going to see a huge downgrade in "link juice" sometime very soon.
The biggest effect I think was on Hubpages and Ezine articles which hurts because those are PR 6 and 7 sites respectively. A lot of people count on those for their backlink building strategy. It's not really a smart change because people will just switch over to sites that are unaffected by the change and begin content farming those.
its not a big effect and hubpages is not important to high PR i think so. by Mr. Groupon Clone Script
The new google algorithm will mostly affect aggregate news sites I think. You have an excellent SEO site. You might want to tell your subscribers about this great new SEO tool from Google. It is called Google Website Optimizer and can be found here at https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/exptlist…
You can create experiments within the google interface for very good SEO results.
Keep up the good work!
Paul
This change is really making a difference! Fortunately I'm a content producer.
I’m having many advantages now, but… wish my favorite article directory wouldn’t have lost its traffic this way. Ezinearticles provides all authors with the best tools and has a powerful and well-organized team. It’s really a shame that so many mistakes transformed this top article directory into one of the worst examples online.
I’m suffering for seeing something like that suddenly happen, even though my websites are getting more traffic from Google. Wish I also had the same traffic from my articles like before, and more search engine traffic at the same time. All my articles are original but Ezinearticles’ entire system was beaten… I don’t see so many article links (at Statcounter) sending me the same traffic they usually do…
While it may make our job as SEO consultants more difficult, it isn't necessarily a bad thing. Everyone has known for a while that duplicate content isn't good in terms of SEO; but those content farms were giving duplicate content out to tons of websites, and it was really diminishing the quality of the web. I think it's a good move on Google's part.
I agree…good to see that Google is cleaning up its search engine.
Good to hear that Google is cleaning its search engine. The effect will be on most of Hubpages and Ezines.
The biggest effect I think was on Hubpages and Ezine articles which hurts because those are PR 6 and 7 sites respectively. nike share
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