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Corrected: Google Launches Algorithm To Fight Content Spam

Barry Schwartz on January 28, 2011 at 12:38 pm

Earlier this week, Google’s Matt Cutts announced they will be releasing a new on-page spam detection technique to reduce the amount of content spam we see in Google. Matt Cutts just confirmed the rumors that this algorithm is indeed live.

Matt said the change to their algorithm to prevent low quality scraper content in Google’s index was “approved at our weekly quality launch meeting last Thursday and launched earlier this week.” Based on tracking Webmasters, I believe the rollout was on January 26th and 27th, I have more on that at the Search Engine Roundtable and there is more coverage at Techmeme.

As you know, this algorithm change should be impacted content farms and low quality sites. It goes beyond the low quality site’s impacted in the May Day update and tackles other low quality signals.

Who does this impact? Matt Cutts explained:

This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.

I assume we will see more complaints from those impacted recently by this algorithm change in the upcoming weeks.

Postscript: I have an update to this story at Google’s Content Farm Algorithm Not Live Yet. In short, the content farm algorithm is not live. What is live is the algorithm to drop out low quality scraper content.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.