Google launches algorithm to fight low-quality scraper content

Earlier this week, Google’s Matt Cutts announced the company would be releasing a new on-page spam detection technique to reduce the amount of content spam we see in Google. 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 Jan. 26 and 27. There is more coverage at Techmeme.

Who does this impact? 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.

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