subject: Google's New Algorithm 2011 [print this page] Google's New Algorithm 2011 Google's New Algorithm 2011
In a tacit admission that Web publishers are flooding its search engine with low-quality pages, Google has revised its methods to improve the usefulness of its results.
The move intended to raise the position of quality content in rankings. There have been complaints.
Google's change is believed to have been aimed at "content farms" producing content to meet the most frequently searched terms of the moment, but many legitimate site operators are up in arms, complaining that their ranking fell dramatically overnight.
The changes, implemented in the last few days, impacts about 11.8 percent of Google's queries, Google's Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts wrote in a blog post. The duo defined low-quality sites as those that are a "low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful."
"In the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our rankinga change that noticeably impacts 11.8 percent of our queriesand we wanted to let people know what's going on," Google said in a blog post last night. "This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sitessites 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 sitessites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on."
The Silicon Valley company built its business on the strength of algorithms that yield speedy results. The company constantly refines those formulas, and sometimes takes manual action to penalize companies that it believes use tricks to artificially rise in search rankings. In recent weeks, it has cracked down on retailers J.C. Penney Co. and Overstock.com Inc.
Singhal and Cutts did not provide too many details about what this algorithmic change entailed; search engine ranking mechanisms are often closely guarded secrets. But they said this week's change did not rely on changes it received from its "Personal Blocklist" Chrome extension. That tool, introduced last week, lets Chrome users eliminate Google search results from dubious domains. Google did, however, compare the Blocklist data it has gathered with the sites identified by the algorithm, and found that user preferences are "well represented" in the new algorithm.
"If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84 percent of them, which is strong independent confirmation of the user benefits," Singhal and Cutts wrote.
Content farms like Demand Media, which churns out thousands of insta-stories often based on other people's reporting, may be Google's target, though the company has never said that; or it could simply be the countless other small, semi-robotic sites that suck up other peoples content and present it as their own. Whatever the case, with this new algorithm in place I have one essential question: Is Google's search algorithm change having an impact on your Web site?
"Mahalo, AOL, and Demand Media in particular also stand accused of manipulating search results. Huffpo was described as perpetrating the worst ever example of "SEO whoring."
Despite the dominance of its search engine, Google has taken hits in recent months for allowing sites to rise in search results that deliver questionable or little value to Web searchers. Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's School of Information, described Google in a blog post as a "tropical paradise for spammers and marketers."
The debate over the quality of Google's search results has not shrunk its commanding lead over Microsoft Corp.'s Bing search engine. But Google is taking steps to protect its public image as that debate spills into the mainstream from the more arcane world of search optimization, where professionals make a living helping websites rise in Google rankings.
Google promised more updates that will improve the quality of page results in the months ahead. Today's change is launching in the U.S. at this point, but it will be rolled out elsewhere over time.
The news comes several weeks after Google accused Microsoft of copying Google results on Bing; an accusation Microsoft hotly denied. Earlier this year, Google also defended its search-related spam-fighting policies and denied that sites with Google ads get a free pass. It did, however, acknowledge an uptick in spam and pledged to crack down more heavily on content farms.
