Google announced late Thursday that they have launched a pretty big algorithmic update, most likely added another filter, which is targeted to improve Google SERPs. This update is quite important since it’s going to affect, according to Google, about 12% of all their search queries.
Well, that’s big news and quite bad one for low quality MFACFs (Made For AdSense Content Farms) websites, forums and blogs to which it’s specifically targeted. In case you are wondering what a Content Farm looks like, thisSatire Article Page just nails it – except that AdSense is not included. Some real world examples of Content Farms include about.com, eHow and Answerbag.com. These websites publish articles, which is often low quality useless junk, based on popular search queries so that they will rise to the top of the rankings and get ad clicks.
Although they have not mentioned the Content Farm term per say in the current announcement, but Matt Cutts had talked about it last week when interviewed by NYTimes that are going to introduce an update to fix their SERPs to rid themselves from low quality websites. They have done that now and although it’s been introduced to US originated queries only yet but planned to roll out to all web, SEOs are already clamouring how adversely it has hit them, in some cases as much as 50% of their traffic is gone now.
The most depressing part of Google post for webmasters of such web farms read as follows:
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.
And that’s not all, Google has also introduced a Personal Blocklist Chrome extension last week to allow people to block individual domains to stop appearing in Google search results. This extension can send patterns that you choose to block and/or unblock websites.
Although Google claims that this algo update does not rely on the feedback they receive from the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension, they did compare the Blocklist data gathered with the websites filtered by Google current algorithm update, a whopping 84% of them were found matched!
It’s about time Google did this, finally! Sink those parasite aggregators too.
