Google Changes Its Algorithm To Improve Search Result Quality

In an effort to improve the relevancy and quality of its results, Google has revamped its search engine methods to sift out poor-quality Webpages.

The search giant said the change would increase the rankings of high-quality Websites and drop the results of lesser sites, affecting about 12 percent of total search queries.

Weary Websites that release articles or build links based on specific keywords people are searching, commonly known as link farms or keyword heavy landing pages, have recently made their way to the top of search engine results. Such sites have reputation for frustrating some users. High search engine rankings are critical because they enable Websites to receive more visibility and traffic, resulting in more business.

“I haven’t seen as much negative attention on Google’s results as I have in the last month or two — it’s been fairly unprecedented,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land and an industry expert.

A key portrayal of Google to its users is that it provides the best results on the Web. The search engine giant has become the leader because its technology produced better, more relevant results for users. If users start to doubt the quality of its search engine results, Google risks losing not only its top reputation, but also its loyal users to other search competitors.

Although such "content farms" can sometimes offer valuable information, or at least a direction to good resources, many of their articles and outbound links are of debatable value yet still see high rankings in searches.

Google changes it's search engine algorithm roughly 500 times a year, most of them minor alterations. Amit Singhal, an employee at Google who was involved in the latest change, said in an interview that Google users were likely to notice the recent modification.

“We haven’t done a change where we have impacted low-quality sites at this level in years,” Mr. Singhal said. “It’s a clear evolution of the algorithm as the Web is evolving, the content on the Web is evolving, the user expectation is evolving.”

Google still the owns most of the Internet search market, capitalizing on 66 percent of all search activity in the United States. The company has larger proportions of the search pie in many other countries, according to comScore, a Web analytics company.

Hitwise, an analytics firm, measures statistics on "how happy" users are with their search results by observing how many inquiries are successful - meaning the user remains on the first Website they choose to click on. At Bing, a competing search engine that is growing in popularity, 82 percent of searches queries are deemed successful. At Google, the rate of 'user satisfaction' is 66 percent.

“This change is about more than just cleaning up content farms,” said Chris Copeland, chief executive of GroupM Search, an organic SEO (search engine optimization) firm. “Google has a relevancy problem, and they are trying to do something about it.”

The search engine company implemented the algorithm change after technology bloggers, industry experts and common users filed complaints that Google's results rendered useless pages. The feedback may in turn enhance Google’s reputation, Mr. Sullivan said.

“The change may not necessarily improve the results — hopefully it will — but it will definitely improve the perception of Google,” he said.

The change to Google's search formula does not address all techniques that problematic Websites use to achieve better results. The effort to improve the quality of search results is a cat-and-mouse game — once Google puts a change into affect, developers and SEO companies figure out a way around it.

When Google was first unveiled in 1998, the key advantage savvy Web developers realized was how the search engine algorithm valued sites based on the amount of links it had directed to its Webpages. But as users quickly learned how to take control of those links to increase their site's rankings, Google began focusing more on other factors.

“Our algorithm clearly gets attacked by these techniques every day,” Mr. Singhal said. “However, with the amount of information that we have, we are pretty far ahead in the game.”

Even though the announcement by Google did not specifically say anything of content farms, the leader of Google’s spam-fighting team, Matt Cutts, has spoken in recent weeks about the issues with content farms and added that Google was determining ways to deal with them.

“There are some content farms that I think it would be fair to call spam, in the sense that the quality is so low-quality that people complain,” Cutts said in an interview.

Certain Websites that are often considered “content farms” include Yahoo’s Associated Content, AOL’s Seed and Demand Media’s eHow and Answerbag. For instance, Demand Media uses software technology to find out what keywords users are searching on Google, automatically creates headlines based on those keywords, and hires freelance copywriters churn out link-heavy articles.

Frustrations spawning from these questionable Websites has been of serious concern for Google, and the company claimed it had been addressing such issues for over a year. At about the same time Demand Media went public a few months ago, technology bloggers began posting complaints that a Google search for new appliances had generated useless results.

The valuation of a Website's quality is naturally subjective, however Google has processes in place to address and determine relevancy and value. The company does things like “boomerang” search tracking - monitoring instances when users click on a link and immediately click back to the results.

Some Website search engine optimization consultants who help businesses improve their search rankings claim Websites like Demand Media might not be affected by the recent change. They said that Google’s true target was the hundreds of companies that post duplicate content on multiple of Websites.

Several of these sites will still figure out a way to get back up to the top of Google’s rankings, said Mr. Copeland of GroupM Search.