Google Clamps Down on Shallow or Low-quality Content
The world’s number one search engine, Google, announced on Friday via the Official Google Blog that the newest search algorithm update will have a significant change that will impact 11.8% of their search queries.
Google ‘s Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer explained in the post, Finding more high-quality sites in search, that the company’s goal is simple:
“To give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.”
The pair continued to elaborate with:
“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. 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.”
This major Google announcement follows up to what Matt Cutts revealed in his blog post on the Official Google blog on January 21st:
“And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites.
As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content.”
The Mountain View, CA mega search engine will launch this change in the U.S. only to start and plans to roll it out in other market areas over time.
Google’s message to content farms is crystal clear: sites that have shallow content or low-quality content that is heavily search engine optimized and that are disliked by visitors will ultimately be filtered out and will not be rewarded by Google’s search engine.
What do you think? Are you happy to see Google clamping down on content farms?
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