Google Payday Loan Algorithm: Google Search Algorithm Update To Target Spammy Queries

Google has officially launched a new search update to target “spammy queries” such as [payday loan], pornographic and other heavily spammed queries.

Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, announced this on Twitter saying “We just started a new ranking update today for some spammy queries.” He pointed to the video he published where he talked about upcoming Google SEO changes.

Our summary then was:

While queries that tend to be spammy in nature, such as [pay day loans] or some pornographic related queries, were somewhat less likely to be a target for Google’s search spam team – Matt Cutts said Google is more likely to look at this area in the near future. He made it sound like these requests are coming from outside of Google and thus Google wants to address those concerns with these types of queries.

Here is the video where he pre-announced this change at about 2 minutes in 30 seconds in:

While at SMX Advanced, Matt Cutts explained this goes after unique link schemes, many of which are illegal. He also added this is a world-wide update and is not just being rolled out in the U.S. but being rolled out globally.

This update impacted roughly 0.3% of the U.S. queries, but Matt said it went as high as 4% for Turkish queries were Web spam is typically higher.

For more of our coverage on Matt’s talk at SMX Advanced see Google’s Cutts Talks Structured Data Beta, Mobile Site Speed Need, Penalty Notices To Get Example Links & More.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.