The cat is out of the bag and a major algorithm change has been launched within Google. Matt Cutts has come out and stated the news on his blog which you can read here. This is definitely a post everyone should be reading but to do a slight bit of dupe content myself, this is what their focusing on:
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.
While I’ve been ranting about our problem with content scrapers, but this week we’ve been seeing a huge improvement of the scrapers not even registering. I’m hoping this is the start of a cleaner search result, and a rise in revenue for everyone, including Google.
There is a huge amount of web chatter going on in the forums, on the blogs and Twitter so I’ll do my best to round it up here for your reading pleasure. Google and Matt are not always crystal clear on the entirety of a algorithm change, so the best course of action is to of course read up and view results for yourself. Take note of any problems your site is having and keep detailed notes of a more positive, or negative SERP result experience. Here is all I could find talking about the change, but feel free to drop some links that I missed in the comments.
January 2011 Algorithm Change Resources:
– Confirmed: Google’s Content Farm Algorithm Live! Sites Are Dropping! via Search Engine Roundtable
– Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO via Matt Cutts
– Matt Cutts: Google Algorithm Change Launched via Webmaster World
– Google algorithm change launched via Hacker News
– Google’s War on Spam Begins: New Algorithm Live via SEW Blog
– Google Launches Algorithm To Fight Content Spam via Search Engine Journal
