Google Tweaks Search Algorithm To Weed Out Content Farms

Google has announced a change to its search algorithm in an effort to reduce the rankings for low-quality sites, so called content farms.

The news came to light due to a blog post by Amit Singhal (a Google Fellow) and Matt Cutts, who is principal engineer at Google.

“Our 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,” they wrote.

Search Improvement

But they insisted that the changes, which have come online over the past couple of days, will be so subtle that few people will notice them.

“In the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking – a change that noticeably impacts 11.8 percent of our queries – and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. 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,” they wrote.

“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 wrote.

And they warned that they couldn’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. “It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down,” they wrote.

At the moment the change only applies in the United States, but Google plans to roll it out elsewhere over time.

Content Farms

The move is the latest attempt by Google clamp down on content farms. Last week for example Google launched a small application for the Chrome web browser to allow people to block websites from their web search results on Google.com, as part of the content farm clampdown.

Indeed, Matt Cutts and his team began tackling content farms in late 2010, after acknowledging that content farms had become a problem.

Content farms are websites that utilise large amounts of textual content, specifically designed to satisfy the algorithms of Google and co., for maximal retrieval by search engines. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue. So essentially they are websites that tend to be full of adverts and very little original content.

Indeed, tech-savvy users have long been complaining about the rising spam quotient on Google, which was once hallowed for its clean, efficient search service.

On 14 February, Cutts revealed that Google had cracked down on J.C. Penny after its SEO firm ‘gamed’ Google to get top billing in dozens of popular product searches. And it has also just been revealed that Google has manually demoted Overstock.com in its search results to penalise the company for trying to game Google’s search algorithm.

So there is little doubt that Google has been on the defensive about this subject.

Bing Vs Google

In late January, Google responded to complaints about the quality of its search results, and then in early February Cutts used a Microsoft Bing-sponsored search event to publicly accuse Bing of copying Google search results.

“We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop,” responded Yusuf Mehdi, senior VP of Microsoft’s online services division, on the Bing Community blog. Microsoft claimed that Google is simply worried about Bing’s progress in acquiring market share.

According to research firm comScore, Bing is slowly increasing its share of the US search market. It stood at 12 percent in December 2010, well behind Google’s 66.6 percent. Yahoo stood at 16 percent, although Bing powers its back-end search.