Google Tweaks Algorithm to Push Down Low-Quality Sites

[KansDem]

Source: New York Times

Google said late Thursday that it had made a major change to its algorithm in an effort to improve the rankings of high-quality Web sites in its search results — and to reduce the visibility of low-quality sites. While the company did not say so explicitly, the change appears to be directed in part at so-called content farms like eHow and Answerbag, which generate articles based on popular search queries so they will rise to the top of the rankings and attract clicks.

Google has been facing criticism from some users for allowing articles that aren’t useful to appear prominently in search results. That has now changed, according to the company.

“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites — sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other Web sites or sites that are just not very useful,” Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, and Matt Cutts, who leads Google’s spam-fighting team, wrote in a company blog post. “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.”

Google has said that it makes about 500 changes to its algorithm a year, but most are so small that the company doesn’t announce them. This one will affect 11.8 percent of search queries, Google said, so it is big enough to significantly change the results that people see.


Read more: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/google-tweaks-algorithm-to-push-down-low-quality-sites/?hp

[MineralMan]

1. This is an excellent decision. There is so much crap out there, and

Google hasn't done a good job of eliminating it from its search engine results. Quality content counts now, as it should.

[Angleae]

35. Depends on their definition of "quality"

If quality = eye-candy and/or high advertising revenues then this is not a good thing.

[Wilms]

2. Hope that kills (no)answer.com n/t

[Occulus]

17. And (didn't)fixya.com.

And Yahoo (didn't)answer.

[sofa king]

33. And eHow

Just before Google took over, there was a pretty nifty search engine called Northern Light which allowed the user to create a list of NOT domains which would automatically be excluded from the results. Among my fellow researchers, it was known as a "shit-stripper." By the late '90s, Yahoo was already high on everyone's list of crap sites.

Don't bother looking it up now, as it has turned to crap itself.

I have often wondered if it's possible to provide a stock, actual answer to the garbage answers.com pages, which would be "please ignore this domain in future searches."

[ixion]

3. Good. It's about time.

[boppers]

4. In the SEO industry, 11.8% is huge.

Oddly enough, though, I haven't seen a lot of noise. I'm guessing most of the folks dinged *knew* they were living on borrowed time.

[MineralMan]

6. It is huge. As someone who makes a living writing original

content for individual small business websites, this will improve things. I work with a web designer who specializes in SEO, and I write the entire content for websites for businesses in the Twin Cities area. The originality has helped get great search engine results placement, but it's always a struggle to compete with sites that just paste in identical content from content mills.

We're very successful with what we do, but this will help our clients out. Quality content that is actually informative will now get better rankings with this in place.

[Dave Caputo]

37. Original Content always gives you bonuses for SEO

What Google is tweaking is the valuation of links that come from unoriginal content farms, or re-use of content from said farms.

There are two kinds of SEO, On-page, and Off-page. On-page is all about good site architecture, proper internal site linking, good original content, and well written meta tags. Off-page involves getting high-quality inbound links using proper anchor text and other social media / blogging interventions. If you run an effective SEO Company nowadays, you have to use both forms of Search Engine Optimization, or you'll never compete on high-competition keywords.

There's a big difference between trying to rank a site for "Accountant Wilwaukee" and "Buy Diet Pills". One is hard, the other is extremely hard. On-page factors alone will NEVER rank you for "Buy Diet Pills", even if you might be able to get some traction for "Accountant Milwaukee" with On-Page factors alone. Might get some traction, that is, if nobody else was working the keyword, which is doubtful now that it's 2011.

Google has been continuously tweaking their algorithm since it was first introduced, and the sites my company has done SEO for have consistently remained in the top of their genres, for years. The Buy Diet Pills guys, who may have relied heavily from inbound links from content farms, tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of them, may suffer some real consequences, but for most sites, especially those who don't use those kinds of mechanisms, will probably be largely unaffected, especially if they try to do good On-site work and have at least a modest campaign of Off-site processes underway.

Good to see there's a lively discussion about this going on!

[HopeHoops]

5. The skeptic in me translates "low-quality" into "low-revenue-stream".

Have you noticed how the paid placement sites are eating more and more real estate on Google search results?

[Born Free]

13. I agree

Far too many times the top results are web sites to sell you something

[think4yourself]

14. Exactly.

That's what this is all about. Who is going to dig through 12 pages of search results to find the BEST solution? Why think? Let Google pick the prettiest for you.

[Occulus]

18. No. That's incorrect.

Google is targeting sites that don't give any actual content, like (as pointed out above) answer.com, fixya.com, and Yahoo Answers.

I'll be glad to see them disappear, frankly. They're internet pollution.

[HopeHoops]

31. Hopefully you are right. There's too much of that crap out there. But that skeptic is still there

[onehandle]

7. Probably to guide eyeballs to their own ads. Another attack on Net Neutrality?

So it's up to that giant corporation to tell us what a 'low-quality site' is?

The result may seem benign, but it's Google, so it's about control.

[MineralMan]

8. Actually, this will only affect organic results. Ads are handled

differently. Organic results are something completely different, and are based on the content on the actual site. This should help move sites with quality, unique content up the results, and that's a good thing.

Paid ads will always be at the very top, but high rankings for organic searches actually produce better results for the websites that achieve those high organic rankings. Some of the sites I've worked on use both paid ads and have very high organic rankings. We can tell where the hits come from, and the ones from clicks on the organic rankings produce more leads and contacts. It's just more difficult to get those rankings than it is to pay for ads.

It's a very interesting thing, writing web content for businesses.

Want an example: Google twin cities duct cleaning. No quotation marks. The top three organic results are one site done by me and the site designer.

[boppers]

23. Longtail city pseudonyms..... very cool!

For boosts on local/places (and NAP citations), we typically target <city>,<st>, along with <zip>, but for "twin cities", and other regions, we haven't gone that angle.... if you're http://www.twincitiesductcleaning.com/ you have 5 on page one for me (logged in, so IP+History+Click history). (BTW, Nicely done, 3 organics, followed by one map/places, and a blogspot).

Of course, if you're http://ductcleaningtwincities.com/ , also well done.... as you've captured a massive amount of first page links (in some cities, we get 80-90% of coverage on the first page, which is, well, HARD, and requires a lot of storefronts, which we have).

[MineralMan]

29. Thanks. The second URL isn't ours.

We do well with the actual city names and state name, too. We're very focused and get good results for our clients, without making our content funky. SEO is important, but so is visitor retention and conversion. The balance of all those things is tricky. We don't have all that many clients who are full SEO clients, and I don't do that part of it anyhow. I'm just a writer, and my job is primarily to get the people who do show up to do something. That's working well, too. Word of mouth is bringing in new clients.

[boppers]

12. Make a better search engine, make billions.

Many have tried.

[speltwon]

19. This has nothing to do with Net Neutrality.

Google is a corporation, and nobody should assume it's "neutral", and even if it provided completely biased searches it wouldn't be a violation of net neutrality. It's a website that provides free searches based on their algorithms. In exchange, they get paid advertising, etc. and of course get to choose how their algorithm works, etc.

This is NOT a net neutrality issue because Google is not the government or an ISP. People may THINK of it any way they want, but it's simply a corporation providing a search engine and making money. Any corporation can put up a search engine based on any algorithm they want. If Google decided to block in their searches, all content from pro-Democratic sites, that wouldn't violate Net Neutrality either. It would just mean they were assmunches.

Here's a reasonably accurate description of what Net Neutrality is from a wikipedia article...

Network neutrality (also net neutrality, Internet neutrality) is a principle proposed for users' access to networks participating in the Internet. The principle advocates no restrictions by Internet service providers and governments on content, sites, platforms, the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and the modes of communication.<1><2><3>

The principle states that if a given user pays for a certain level of Internet access, and another user pays for the same level of access, then the two users should be able to connect to each other at the subscribed level of access.

Though the term did not enter popular use until several years later, since the early 2000s advocates of net neutrality and associated rules have raised concerns about the ability of broadband providers to use their last mile infrastructure to block Internet applications and content (e.g., websites, services, protocols), even blocking out competitors. In the US particularly, but elsewhere as well, the possibility of regulations designed to mandate the neutrality of the Internet has been subject to fierce debate.

Neutrality proponents claim that telecom companies seek to impose a tiered service model in order to control the pipeline and thereby remove competition, create artificial scarcity, and oblige subscribers to buy their otherwise uncompetitive services. Many believe net neutrality to be primarily important as a preservation of current freedoms.<4> Vinton Cerf, considered a "father of the Internet" and co-inventor of the Internet Protocol, Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web, and many others have spoken out in favor of network neutrality.<5><6>

[boppers]

20. "no restrictions by Internet service providers and governments on content"

One word:
SPAM.

Another word:
Virus.

[speltwon]

22. Not sure what the relevance is here

Google is a corporation that is not an ISP and it certainly isn't the govt. It's a company that provides a product. No matter how their search engine works or doesn't, it has zero to do with net neutrality. It would be like saying that a bookstore that doesn't carry books supporting anti-semitism violates the first amendment - the principle of free speech.

It aint the govt. and it aint an ISP. It is a product you can choose to use or not to use, and there is no contract whatsoever so you can always choose something else.

[boppers]

24. My beef isn't with google. It's with NN ideals that have unintended consequences.

(Though, google has been sued for not being "Neutral"... many times. They win. Period.)

I guess I was attempting to take the conversation out of scope.

[speltwon]

25. My bad for not understanding... I've always liked the freewheeling atmosphere

of the internet, and I've been using it since usenet etc. was big (man the flame wars we would have back then). One of the big problems with all the people who want to regulate NN etc. is that they simply don't understand the medium. It's "the intertoobs" people and as Egypt etc. shows --- reigning in the internet often doesn't quite work. And then... there's the Streisand Effect! :)

[boppers]

26. Emacs or Vi?

:P

There's some greybeards on DU, and occasionally conversations get derailed. Nice to "meet" you!

[speltwon]

27. Nice to meet you

and I'll go with PDP-10 :)

[boppers]

28. TECO is the devil.

God, I hated that editor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_Editor_and_Corrector

In an amusing "small world" story, there's a link from that very wikipedia article to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Programmers_Don%27t_Use_Pascal

...the author of which was in my wedding party when I was married last October. (On 10/10/10).

Geeks. We're on the intertubes.

[high density]

30. There are genuine "low quality" sites

I agree that Google may not be the best entity to determine what is "low quality." eHow has plenty of (IMO) genuine usable information on it, so I'm a bit confused about why that one is used as an example. On the other hand, Answerbag results have never been useful for me.

I'd rather see a feature that simply lets me block certain sites from showing up in my search results. Google stores enough information about me already and I don't know why they couldn't start saving these "don't show this" preferences as well. Edited to add: I see Google has a Chrome extension which allows this functionality already.

[Kolesar]

9. Freepatentsonline keeps showing up

and their pages are not very useful.

[boppers]

11. Have you tried the Chrome site blocking extension?

It's mere coincidence, of course, that there was 84% correlation between user-blocked sites, and this algo...

[Kolesar]

34. I found a lot of Google blocking extensions

Which one do you recommend? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search?q=blocker
thanks
84% correlation!

[OhioChick]

10. Good n/t

[Liberalynn]

15. Does this mean

Faux's website won't even appear on "Google Search" any more? :rofl:

Can't think of a lower quality site.

[cbdo2007]

16. Hmmm, how is Google determining these "low quality" sites? I'm hoping...

this doesn't hurt small businesses out there, just because they violate some minor part of Google's formula.

I understand what they're doing and why they're doing it, as my own Google searches can get too crowded with stupid results, but also I work for an internet company who relies heavily on Google searches so I would hate to see our company getting pushed out of the search results just because they PERCEIVE us to be "low quality". Then, what will our recourse by if they do remove us? Google doesn't give a shit about a little million $$ company. I doubt we'll even be able to get to a live person.

[boppers]

21. There's 200+ signals that they use. Google "SEO" for a start?

Your recourse is a re-inclusion request. They can take months to fix your rankings if you violate google guidelines. You *can* get to live people, if you attend conferences, or post to their boards.... but for the most part, if you get busted by the machines, you have to fix your problems, with no other solutions.

Recent busts (in the last month) by google include JCPenny and Forbes.

They really don't care how big or small you are. Just yesterday/today, they re-ranked a 300 million dollar company (Demand Media), because their web articles were, well.... lame. The company lost 18 million dollars in value in a few hours, because google decided their content sucked.

Here's a start:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

Good luck. I'm part of a 100+ person team managing 700+ websites, for 2,500+ businesses. It's an interesting field. Some days, nothing happens..... on other days, we have to change the sites for all 2,500+ businesses... in seconds.

[cbdo2007]

32. Sounds like the day Google decided our website was a "security threat"...

based on a typo in our code.

There's nothing like coming in to work to 200 emails from people asking us why Google says we are a security threat. Then even after fixing the typo in the code, it took 2 full days for them to remove the security threat warning. That's enough to just about kill a small company like ours!

Oh well. Thanks for your input. We don't use much "SEO" but still get pretty good search results naturally. Just crossing my fingers they don't start moving us down for some typo in the code again :)

[zonkers]

36. Tweaking your algorithm sounds dirty.

[KansDem]

38. Yeah, if you do it too much, you'll go blind!

...or so I've heard.

[Blue_Tires]

39. I was wondering when enough people would be pissed off...

It's getting to the point now where any historical topic I search for only results in the wiki and 100 other sites copying the wiki

[Avant Guardian]

40. Google tried to fix this long ago, but the minions wouldnt have it

I took a 'Human computer interaction' course at a university that was co-taught by the leader of Googles gmail team. He told us that there are far more efficient search engine algorithms out there than what Google uses, but when Google ran trials with the better algorithms, the end users did not like it because the search results did not look like normal Google search results. The test subjects did not like the results from the better algorithms.

Looks like reality finally caught up to them.