Google changes search algorithm to block content farms, promises higher quality results

Businesses have been warned to ensure their website content is fresh and free of redundancies after Google changed its algorithm last week to ensure content farms would be stricken from people’s search results.

The supposed target of the change was a site called Demand Media, which hires hundreds of freelance writers designed to pump out content for “how to” sites, the most prominent of which is eHow.com. Now, Google says it won’t tolerate that activity any more.

Jim Stewart from Stewart Media says the changes to the algorithm aren’t going to affect the average small business, but he nevertheless warns companies to keep ensuring they have rich, relevant content on their sites so they rank higher.

“Google could have just targeted the one site rather than make a change to the algorithm, so it suggests that they’re targeting a number of sites.”

“Businesses just need to be aware that you’re adding value to your site. Check with whoever is doing your SEO so that you know they’re not doing anything bad, such as grabbing links from content farms, and so on.”

Late last week, Google said that it would change its algorithm once again to ensure that more people are seeing high-quality search results – and they promise it’s going to have a big impact.

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

The update will lower rankings for content farms – sites which produce content for various topics but don’t necessarily add much value or go in-depth about any of the topics for which they are covering. Essentially, they farm content to ensure more advertising revenue through page views.

“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,” Google said.

While Google did not name Demand Media specifically, the move is widely believed to be a move in part against the company which recently launched a successful IPO.

However, in a new blog post, Demand Media chief Larry Fitzgibbon said that so far, it hasn’t seen any changes in its rankings.

“It’s impossible to speculate how these or any changes made by Google impact any online business in the long-term – but at this point in time, we haven’t seen a material net impact on our Content & Media business.”

“However, we generally don’t comment or speculate on changes by major search engines. They make changes nearly daily in a quest to give consumers the best possible experience, as do we.”

Part of the driving force behind this new move is the launch of a new Chrome extension called Blocklist, which allows Google to receive data from customers about what they believe to be spam showing up in their search results.

Google says that if you take the top dozen domains that users have blocked using the extension – 84% of those are affected by the new algorithm change.

So far, this change has only taken place in the US, but it will roll out internationally over time. Stewart says businesses simply need to ensure they’re writing pages their customers will value and learn something from.

“Businesses need to be using relevant content on their sites and provide value for their visitors, not just churning out content that doesn’t help anyone.”

Google said in its post that it will reward sites with “original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on”.