If you searched for something and on top of your SERP (Search Results Page) came eHow with crappy articles like how to tie your laces or how to be successful in life by smiling (no, I’m not joking) then you can understand that something had to change, at least if Google hopes to remain the leader of web search on long term.
Well, the search giant started to take action and in their case, that means some algorithm tweaking. While per their own admission Google tweaks their algorithms many times (around 500 times per year) most of the changes are minor. This one however is massive, affecting 11.8% from our queries which means billions of queries will be affected.
The change is designed to lower the ranking for low quality websites, the ones that do not provide original content or low usefulness websites. Obviously to keep everything nicely balanced, the sites at the opposite side, the ones that brings high quality content will see their rankings boosted.
To serve the same purpose, Google launched not too long ago a Chrome extension that tries to get the popular vibe about various sites, but today’s change does not seem to rely on that data. This makes sense since the extension is still fairly new and data gathered is limited. However, Google compared the new page rank as calculated by the new algorithm versus whatever data gathered from Chrome users and the match seems to be around 84%. Not bad, but we should expect thousands of small and medium websites to be caught in the process and benefit or be punished for no particular reason.
The change will happen first in US followed by the rest of the world.
via Google Blog
