On Feb. 25, 2011 Google announced that it had made major changes to its search algorithm. While most of Google's updates are fairly minor (not really noticable to the average user or site owner), this update is expected to affect almost 12% of sites. Before I go any further, it should be noted that for now these changes only affect U.S. search results - but Google is expected to role out the changes globally in the near future.
Why Did Google Make This Change?
Google has received numerous public complaints over the past few months about the low quality of its search results. This has become an increasing problem as content farms (sites like Demand Media) have figured out how to play the search engine optimization (SEO) game and get their content on the first page of the search results.
Google is now facing increasing competition. The U.S. search engine business is now effectively a duopoly between Google and Bing/Yahoo. By some accounts Bing has begun eating into Google's search market share. More importantly Bing has a much higher success rate than Google - 81.5% versus 65.5%. What this means is 81.5% of Bing users actually click through to a Web site after a search as compared with 65.5% for Google users.
Google is also facing increasing competition for eyeballs from social media sites, like Twitter and Facebook, and search startups, like Blekko.
Who Is Impacted?
It is still pretty early to predict exactly what impact this will have on various sites, but we can speculate based on what Google is trying to accomplish.
The following types of sites are likely to see their ranking negatively impacted:
- Content farms that offer a broad range of content that is shallow and of low quality.
- Scraper sites that take content content from other sites and offer nothing original
- Sites that have no backlinks or a few low quality backlinks
What Can I Do About It?
If your site falls into one of the categories above, you probably need to rethink your entire strategy. Quick and dirty SEO approaches that worked well in the past will likely not work now.
According to the Official Google Blog, Google is looking for, "sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on."
Exactly how Google is going to figure out the quality or depth of your research is still a mystery (I am betting that the content farmers will quickly figure out how to make their content look like original research).
So, if your site does not fall into one of the above categories then you should just follow good, white hat SEO practices. Keep creating original content for your site - remember content is king! Google is placing much more emphasis on quality and originality.