Google Changes Search Algorithm, Continues to Fight Content Farms
Earlier this month we were reporting that Google rolled out the Personal Blocklist extension for its Chrome web browser. Chrome users who get this extension (they can grab it free of charge from the Chrome Web Store or from the Extensions Gallery) can block certain sites from appearing in the list of search results. Mountain View-based search engine giant will collect data on the sites users block and use it to better fight content farms.
Content farms, as Google explained, are sites that do not have a lot to offer. They have plenty of content, but that content is “shallow or low-quality” and most times copied from other sites. Because Google’s aim is to provide top quality, relevant search results to all its users out there, Google is doing its best to not display such sites in the search results.
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Last week Google announced that in its fight against content farms, in its stride to provide users with quality and relevant search results, it made a significant change to its search algorithm. The change, which according to Google impacts 11.8% of its queries, is meant to promote top quality, useful sites, and shun aside low quality, not very useful sites and sites that copy content from other sites. So to put it in other words, the algorithm change gives a hard blow to content farms.
“We’re very excited about this new ranking improvement because we believe it’s a big step in the right direction of helping people find ever higher quality in our results. We’ve been tackling these issues for more than a year, and working on this specific change for the past few months. And we’re working on many more updates that we believe will substantially improve the quality of the pages in our results,” commented Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer.
The two went on to say that the algorithm change is being rolled out in the US at this time. In the future it will be rolled out elsewhere.
Earlier this month we were reporting that Google 