Mar 03 2011 March 3, 2011 November 26, 2019 by Webmaster

Google released a big update to their ranking algorithm during last week.

Posted in
This update affects approximately 12% of all queries and the search result pages can change dramatically.
Who will be affected by this?
Google has not officially confirmed this, but the algorithm change attempts to remove “content-farms” from the search results. Content farms are sites that require minimal time and money to generate large amounts of content that is produced by people  who are not necessarily familiar with the subject they write about.
Content farms try to obtain visitors via high rankings for as many different keywords as possible. These visitors should click on the ads that are displayed on the content farm sites.
Some examples are sites such as hubpages.com, findarticles.com and answerbag.com that have lost thousands of high rankings.
How will this change affect your website?
Google’s is serious about eliminating spam from the search results. They announced they’re working on “many more updates that we believe will substantially improve the quality of the pages in our results”.
Dodgie tactics to improve the position of a website on Google is risky.
Here are some examples of optimisation techniques that are considered as SPAM:
  • scraped content that is made for AdSense websites
  • cloaking and false redirects (Google gets other pages than real web surfers)
  • keyword stuffing and pages loaded with irrelevant words
  • hidden text or hidden links
  • misspellings of well-known websites
  • fully automated, unrelated and centralised link farms
The results are usually short term using these techniques and then it is possible that the site is banned from search engines.

Google’s Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts comments on the recent changes in ranking algorithm, which was named “Panda”, reveal that Google does not want to see shallow content in the search results.

Google came up with a variety of questions to judge the quality of a site.

“Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card? Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids? Do you consider this site to be authoritative? Would it be okay if this was in a magazine? Does this site have excessive ads?”

How can you ensure that your website is not targeted by Google’s new algorithm?

  • The website must have enough content to be useful (quality content).
  • The website has to contain well written content.
  • The content of the website must be unique not copied from other sites.
  • Content should be useful to your website visitors.

A frequently asked question pages or section such as this page for Genesis Bus Tour and Coach Charters are very specific where visitors are always looking for information that is brought all together.

Share