14 DAY TRIAL // Google's battle against low quality content websites is heating up as the search engine introduced a major change to its ranking algorithm affecting some 12 percent of all queries. While Google won't go into too many details, the change is likely aimed at "content farm" sites which produce large amounts of low quality, search-driven content.
The change is now live in the US, but it will be introduced to the localized search engines as well.
The move had been previously announced, as Google said it plans to do something about this type of sites, especially after receiving an increasing amount of criticism about their presence in the search results.
"Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them," Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, two people with a lot of weight involved with Google search, wrote.
"But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on," they announced.
"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," they explained.
Google didn't provide many details on what the change entailed or what websites were affected, but it's not hard to guess. Previously, Google did say it plans to do something about "content farms," though it didn't name any website even then.
It also said it plans to demote "scraper" sites, those that aggregate content from various sources but add little of their own or other additional, useful information. An algorithm change affecting scrapers was introduced about a month ago.
A couple of weeks ago, Google also launched a Chrome extension enabling users to block domains they believe are irrelevant to their searches.
Google says that it did not use the data from the extension, which it collects, for the content farm algorithm update. However, it did say that the change affected 84 percent of the websites blocked by users, confirming its effectiveness.