Algorithm change went into effect earlier this week.
Google web spam czar Matt Cutts blogged today about a recent algorithm change to Google’s rankings.
The algorithm change is a follow up to Cutt’s post a week ago about addressing low level “content farms”.
An algorithm change designed to address these concerns launched earlier this week. It specifically addresses “sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content”.
I suspect this primarily refers to site scrappers, sploggers, etc. instead of sites like Demand Media’s eHow, which was at the center of attention after Cutt’s first post. A number of commentors have asked this but have not received a response.
so with the ipo of demand media access to public funds this substandard company demand media has coerced a change to google that will effect approxmately 2% of search results.specifically stated is content that is scraped or copied. did google address rss feeds anywhere? this is copied content and a revelant issue…again google has effected everybody.and as we can all see with domaining.com rss feeds are important as the reader can now go to one website instead of ten websites.as media content fractures this will become a more important issue.
demand media has had a negative effect and has been a public company for less than 3 days.
I haven’t really seen much different yet in a couple of mini-sites, but those had about 5 250 word uniques articles each so I’m hoping the domain names get the Google Love and not get Google slapped.
Have you seen your domain names take a hit so far?
Domain Guy how did Demand Media do this ?
And what is low level of original content ?
Take this post, and please this is not a knock Andrew as I found it valuable, but to flip the page. Its an article about 100 words and tells people what someone else wrote, I think this is valuable because this is where I come to read. But does Google consider this article low level ?
Thank goodness! Geesh. There is so much clutter in my category. Sites with a lot of unintelligible “content.” I sometimes find the idea of spam amusing…until I have to sort through it. Viva Google’s spam team.
I m actually seeing more visitors than previous weeks in one website that was launched 2 weeks ago using feeds from other websites.
@ Makis
…me too! was wondering what caused the spike on my sites. Not alotta original content but do have feeds that are useful to visitors at my sites.
I have to ask why duplicate content is such a problem? A distinction between spam and syndication needs to be made. If all content was uniquite, there would be much that was never seen because you can only go to so many sites in a day.
All google should do at this point is use a grammer engine to filter out all of the very poor quality stuff that’s out there. You can’t set it too high or you will lose the content by non-native English speakers that still have much value.
I worry a bit about nameservers too and whether mass development companies’ nameservers might get blocked or demoted.
For example, there might be several “low content” sites assigned to a nameserver along with one very rich content site. Will the rich content site suffer due to its nameserver association with the other low quality sites?