Yesterday Google launched a pretty big change to their algorithm that will impact 11.8% of all its search queries. The update has been rolled out in the US only for now and will reduce the rankings of many low quality sites – sites which don’t provide value add for the users and scrape content from other sites which are not very useful, mainly being content farms. Once the algorithm change has been complete sites with original relevant content will be rewarded encouraging a healthier web ecosystem. Google has also noted that this update does not use the data that they have received since the launch of the new Personal Blocklist Chrome extension which we blogged about here, however they have compared the data with the sites that the algorithm change has identified. If Google does manage to stop these black hat SEO techniques then it will be a considerable achievement as this has somewhat plagued the search industry for some time now. So how will this affect you ? If your company provides good quality, relevant and original content and you update your site regularly, then this latest algorithm update will have very little or no effect on site.

Matthew Marley 360innovate