14 DAY TRIAL // Google has updated its search algorithm again in its quest to demote low-quality sites and do a better job at surfacing websites that value content over traffic. A month and a half ago, Google introduced the "Farmer" algorithm change which targeted content farms in particular. Now it's expanding on it and also launching it globally.
The "Farmer" update looked at a number of signals to determine whether a site fitted the content farm profile. Now it's going after long tail searches as well meaning that smaller sites will start being affected by the changes.
It's also rolling out the update algorithm to all English language searches on Google domains.
"We’ve rolled out this improvement globally to all English-language Google users, and we’ve also incorporated new user feedback signals to help people find better search results," Amit Singhal, Google Fellow in charge of search quality, writes.
"In some high-confidence situations, we are beginning to incorporate data about the sites that users block into our algorithms," he also said.
"In addition, this change also goes deeper into the 'long tail' of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before," he added.
Initially, the algorithm update concerned only the searches on Google.com. Now, all searches in English are affected, both in other English-speaking countries such as the UK as well as those where the user chooses English as the search language.
Google has also gotten better at weeding out low-quality sites even if it has fewer signals, so smaller sites will begin to see the effects. The changes only affect about 2 percent of US searches, as opposed to the 12 percent that the previous big update affected.
The biggest change though is that Google has started incorporating direct data from users into the search results. Recently, Google introduced a feature enabling searchers to block domains that they didn't want to show up in their searches again.
At the time, Google said that it will keep an eye on the data but it won't be using it to rank sites. Now it's confident enough to start incorporating it, though it's not a major factor.
User data on blocked domains will be used mainly to confirm that a site which the algorithm determined to be low quality really is so, and not the other way around.