Google makes significant changes to its ranking algorithm

Google has recently implemented a significant change to its ranking algorithm that it has been working on for over a year. This change is initially being introduced on Google.com in the US but is then being rolled out to the other regional versions of Google and is intended to exclude low-quality, ‘shallow’ and copied “spam” content from its top search results.

Although Google hasn’t made any large scale changes to their ranking criteria for several years, this recent one follows growing criticism of the quality of Google’s search results, with the increase in duplicated or low grade content sites populating the search results. Since this change was introduced, a number of studies (including one by Sistrix) have indicated a large impact on sites that carry that type of content, with some – such as citytowninfo.com – losing up to 86% of their rankings.

These type of sites have been coined as “Scraper” or “Farmer” sites. The former are those widely defined as not having original content, but instead pull content in from other sources. The latter are content farms that have shallow or low quality content – these sites are typically achieving revenue from affiliate links or Google AdSense links and add little value to the searcher. From initial studies, the change has impacted about 12% of US results and these changes will be rolled out worldwide soon.

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s spam fighting team, recently said: “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”.

One of these methods is for Google to target the correct sites through feedback from users of the Google Chrome browser. Cutts says that 84% of the sites that were impacted by the new ranking changes were in the top 50 of the sites that were most reported as spam. He also mentions that none of the data from that tool was used to actually make changes that are part of these latest algorithm changes but explained that “these are sites that people want to go down, and they match our intuition”, so Google crafted a ranking algorithm to tackle the “content farm problem” independently of the Chrome spam reporting tool.

In the real world, the difference in the results seem negligible for many companies, as it still seems easy to find plenty of low quality, irrelevant or duplicate content in the US results, but Cutts insists that the changes Google is making does improve results according to its own internal testing methods.

If you’d to know more about how Google’s new algorithm could affect the ranking of your website in the future, please contact us now for details.

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