Google Rolls Out An Algorithmic Update To Remove Spam Sites From Search Results

In recent times, Google has been pretty busy trying to save it’s face from the raising eyebrows on search quality, spam sites infiltrating Google search results and content aggregators dominating the SERP’s. We told you how messy the entire Google experience can get, even Google News is not free from junk sites and content aggregators.

It’s not that Big G wasn’t listening to the appeals, they announced a big algorithmic change in January 2011 followed by announcing domain filtering in search results.

In fact, Google also released a Chrome extension which allows the user to block specific sites on Google search result pages.

Today Google announced that the Google search quality team has rolled out a major algorithmic change in their ranking system. This change will impact almost 11.8 % of search queries made on Google search and the “algorithmic change” is designed such that they will reduce rankings for low quality sites which don’t add value to a subject or scrap content from other sites.

At the same times, Google confirms that the new algorithm will make sure that readers can find more original content in search results. Sites who post original stories, write detailed reports and publish thoughtful analysis or research work are surely going to rank higher in the search results for a given query.

“We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.” says Google in an official blog post.

Google says that the algorithmic update does not entirely rely on the feedback received from the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension. However, the web spam team did consider the data received from the extension and compared it with the sites, which were marked as “SPAM” by the “new Algorithm”. In fact, the algorithmic change addresses 84% of the spam sites, which other users have also blocked in the Personal blocklist chrome extension preferences.

What are those sites ? Google hasn’t disclosed the list.

The algorithmic change is launched in U.S only and will be rolled out on other locations over time.