Google’s Algorithm Change in 2011 and its Impact
A month back, Google announced some meaningful changes in its search algorithm and the changes were more pertaining to content farms. The term content farm refers to a company that engages a fleet of freelance writers to generate huge volumes of textual content specifically designed to satisfy algorithms and facilitate optimum retrieval by search engines.
For quite some time, rumors were rife that Google was contemplating how to treat with content that did not serve the best interests of the users - though they could not be strictly treated as spam.
Penalizing Content Farm
You can also study Squidoo and Hubpages, as they almost serve like article directories in many ways. Hubpages is obviously suffering by this new change though the impact on Squidoo is much less significant. The changes in the algorithm appear to be fulfilling its aim of penalizing content farms – at the face of it.
The content farms are no doubt affected, but they are still attracting huge volumes of traffic from Google. So things are not all that dismal for many webmasters. Curiously, Bigresource.com that is never known for content uniqueness is relatively unaffected by the change, suggesting that content uniqueness is still not a big factor.
Experts opine that Google evaluates duplicated content based on the overall webpage. This means if you reproduce twenty paragraphs of copied contents taken from all over the net, like what bigresource.com does, you are supposed to have achieved unique content. The new algorithm seems to have done precious nothing about it as bigresource.com continues to thrive.
By the same yardstick, Ezinearticles and Squidoo are less affected by the new algorithm not because of any high quality content. With regard to article directories, most people build only back links to their articles in Ezinearticles. In the case of social platforms also, they only build back links to their Squidoo Lenses. The lessons to be drawn are back links are still very important and that is the reason why these sites are less hit.
Reason For Change In Algorithm
Notwithstanding all these comments, it is worthwhile to know from Google what prompted it to bring about the changes. Google claims that the changes were aimed at reducing the rankings for low-quality sites - sites that do not add value to searches and content copied from other websites that are just not very useful. Google maintains it will provide improved rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content offering valuable relevant information - such as research findings, study reports, new insights, in-depth analysis etc.
Some Internet companies have started crying foul and claiming that they have been wrongly victimized in the crossfire. But the one object lesson to be learned from this change by Google is - that while SEO is something very important for any on-line business, it is still essential to concentrate on good quality content.
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