The New York Times recently published this article on the most recent change to Google’s algorithm, which impacts which web sites appear in the organic search.  The article says that although Google makes more than 500 changes a year, this change will definitely be noticed. 

The change was done in a continued effort to weed out sites known as content farms which produce articles and content that is not particularly useful to a searcher.  They hope to help legitimate, high quality web sites regain their organic rankings which have been on the decline due to these content farms.

We hope you find this article useful.  If you would like help navigating the ever-changing search engine landscape, and improving your organic search rankings, please contact lodestar at digitalmarketing@lodestarmg.com.

Seeking to Weed Out Drivel, Google Adjusts Search Engine

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Published: February 25, 2011

In a tacit admission that Web publishers are flooding its search engine with low-quality pages, Google has revised its methods to improve the usefulness of its results.

Google said the change would raise the rankings of high-quality Web sites and reduce those of lesser sites, affecting 12 percent of search queries.

Sites known as content farms, which churn out sometimes mindless articles based on what people are searching for, have recently worked their way to the top of search results, frustrating some Google users. High rankings in search results are crucial because they allow Web sites to get more traffic and bring in more business, either through sales of goods and services or through advertising.

“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.

Persuading users that it has the best results is crucial for Google, whose reputation and status as the front door to the Web depend on them. Though there were many search engines before Google, it became the dominant player because its technology produced better results for users. If people begin to doubt the quality of its results, Google risks losing them to competitors.

While so-called content farms can provide useful information, many of their articles are of questionable value but achieve high rankings in searches. For example, an eHow articleon making friends in college includes tips like “consider joining a sorority or fraternity” and “remember to have a good time, smile and laugh.”

Google makes about 500 changes a year to the algorithm, or formula, that runs its search engine, most of them minor. Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow who worked on the latest change, said in an interview that users were likely to quickly notice this one, which was announced late Thursday.

“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 dominates the Web search market, with a 66 percent share in the United States and a larger one in many other countries, according to comScore, a Web analytics company. But it faces ambitious competitors, most notably Microsoft’s Bing.

Hitwise, an analytics firm, measures how happy users are with their searches by looking at how many are successful, meaning the user stays at the first site they click on. At Bing, 82 percent of searches are deemed successful. At Google, the figure is 66 percent.

“This change is about more than just cleaning up content farms,” said Chris Copeland, chief executive of GroupM Search, a search marketing firm that is part of the advertising company WPP Group. “Google has a relevancy problem, and they are trying to do something about it.”

Google made the change after technology bloggers, industry analysts and everyday users complained that its search results had useless pages. The response may help 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 new algorithm change does not address the full scope of techniques that sites use to manipulate Google. It is a constant cat-and-mouse game — as soon as Google makes a change, Web developers figure out a way around it.

When Google’s search engine was first introduced, in 1998, its primary advantage was that it considered the number of times other sites linked to a certain page, weighing those links as though they were endorsements. But as people quickly learned how to manipulate those links, Google’s search began focusing more heavily on other factors, too. Google haspunished e-commerce sites, including J. C. Penney, for inflating its rankings by paying for links from unrelated sites.

“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.”

Though Google’s announcement did not explicitly mention content farms, and the company declined to say which sites were appearing lower in results, Matt Cutts, who leads Google’s spam-fighting team, has spoken in recent weeks about content farms and said Google was working on 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,” Mr. Cutts said in a recent interview.

Sites that are frequently given the “content farm” label include Yahoo’s Associated Content, AOL’s Seed and Demand Media’s eHow and Answerbag. Demand Media, for example, uses software to track what people are searching for on Google and other sites, generates headlines based on those searches and pays small amounts to freelancers to write the articles.

Criticism of these sites has been on Google’s radar, and the company said it had worked on addressing these problems for more than a year. This winter, Demand Media went public, and its shares jumped 33 percent on its first day of trading; it is now worth $1.9 billion. Around that time, technology bloggers began writing posts like one that complained that a Google search for new dishwashers had produced useless results.

Of course, the quality of a particular site is subjective. To determine quality, Google does things like track “boomerang” searches, when people click on a link and promptly click back to the results, and ask people to compare search results.

Demand Media, which relies on traffic from Google for its livelihood, said in a blog post on Friday that it applauded the changes and that it was too early to determine the long-term effect on Demand’s sites. This week, Richard Rosenblatt, Demand’s chief executive, said it was working to bring in readers from sites other than Google, and introduced a site that discusses Demand’s quality controls. The company’s stock opened sharply lower Friday but closed 1.6 percent higher at $22.96.

Some consultants who help Web sites to improve their search rankings said sites like Demand’s might not feel the brunt of the change. They said Google’s real target was the hundreds of no-profile companies that post duplicate copies of the same text on hundreds of Web sites.

And many of the sites will figure out a new way to climb back up Google’s rankings, said Mr. Copeland of GroupM Search.

“This is a group of people who will analyze this change, come back with a new strategy on Tuesday and be ranking by Thursday,” he said. “It’s kind of like what happens when drug dealers get busted. They don’t find new jobs. They switch corners.”

David Segal contributed reporting.

This blog was posted by Sarah Schwitters, Chief Marketing Strategist at lodestar marketing group.  If you would like help with your search engine optimization or search engine marketing programs, please contact us at digitalmarketing@lodestarmg.com.

Thinking about redesigning your out-of-date website?  While you may be focusing on aesthetics and content, you don’t want to make the mistake of overlooking the importance of SEO, and possibly loosing the existing search traffic of your old site.  When lodestar helps to redesign a website, we place SEO as a top priority.  We make sure every aspect of the new website has SEO best practices in place, to ensure your efforts of website redesign pay off with an increase in search traffic.  Here are a few tips to keep in mind when redesigning your website:

1.  Try to avoid changing URLs.  If you must, such as if you are switching to a different content management system, then try to redirect the old URLs to the matching ones on the new site.  If this seems like too big of a task, then you should at least focus on the top pages, such as the homepage, top entry pages, and most popular pages.  Make this a priority.  You want to make sure the redirects are in place before the search engine spiders revisit your site.

2.  Be careful with content changes.  If your old website was already optimized for SEO, changing the content drastically may decrease rankings on your important keywords.  However, if you did not have SEO in place in your old website, now is the perfect time to get SEO best practices into place and ensure your website will draw in more targeted traffic.

3.  Create and submit an XML sitemap.  It can take a few months for search engines to follow a redirect to a new webpage and rank it.  To speed up this process, you should create an XML sitemap and then submit it to search engines to be indexed.  You want to make sure your new site is indexed as quickly as possible so that visitors will be able to find it.

These are just a few tips to keep in mind when undergoing a website design.  It may seem overwhelming to get all the important SEO best practices in place, but the effort will be worth it.  Let lodestar help you with your website redesign and guarantee that every aspect of your new site has SEO in place.

This article was posted by Carolyn Berger, Director of Marketing and Operations at lodestar marketing group.  If you need help with your search engine marketing, please contact lodestar at sarah@lodestarmg.com.