Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Google’s announcement did not mention content farms. But Mr. Cutts has spoken in recent weeks about the problem and said Google was working on algorithm changes to fix it. “In general, there are some content farms that I think it would be fair to call spam, in the sense that the quality is so low-quality that people complain,” he said in a recent interview.
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. 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. [googleblog.blogspot.com...]
Demand Media Response:
[demandmedia.com...]How our content reaches the consumer – whether it’s through direct visits, social media referrals, apps or search – has always been important to and monitored closely by us. We also recognize that major search engines like Google have and will continue to make frequent changes. We have built our business by focusing on creating the useful and original content that meets the specific needs of today’s consumer. So naturally we applaud changes search engines make to improve the consumer experience – it’s both the right thing to do and our focus as well.
Today, Google announced an algorithm change to nearly 12% of their U.S. query results. As might be expected, a content library as diverse as ours saw some content go up and some go down in Google search results.This is consistent with what Google discussed on their blog post. 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.
If Google can tweak the algo to catch the eHow crap as well this update will be a lot better...
@tedster: I agree finding & penalizing contents farms like ehow.com etc is something too hard for an automated algo.
I've actually been thinking about this quite a bit, and I'm thinking I'm going to (we all should) NoFollow backI agree, in fact I already do that, and Wikipedia as well, if I'm forced to link there.
I don't think any mere tweak is going to spot the kind of low value that ehow seems to offer so much of the time. The problem is they do use literate writers who create grammatical sentences and paragraphs. The pages do have semantic variety. The number of words goes beyond a stub page.
Tedster, I agree. They need to revert this change, and simply do a manual human analysis of eHow. Google's results will never be perfect. They need to stop tweaking their code, and start introducing a batch of live surfers that rank sites for results.
considering that even an ehow is actually better than 99 % of what is out there
Several owners of sites listed in the [Sistrix] study agreed that it assessed the impact of Google's moves on their search rankings accurately.
Johannes Beus, Sistrix's founder, said in an email... "Google aimed at low-quality pages and it looks like it did succeed," he wrote.
So much for our information superhighway...web is now a place for people with money to spend, on sites that are mostly big corporations that have lots of money. :(
Tedster, I agree. They need to revert this change, and simply do a manual human analysis of eHow. Google's results will never be perfect. They need to stop tweaking their code, and start introducing a batch of live surfers that rank sites for results.
