Google’s war on content farms goes global

Google’s algorithmic change targeting content farms and low-quality websites introduced last month has been rolled out globally to benefit all English language users. Today’s rollout also takes into consideration feedback from Google Search users which can now directly impact on a site’s search rank.

After positive feedback from February’s search algorithm improvement, Google have decided to roll out the change to a much larger audience. This previous update effected 11.8% of search queries, while this update, codenamed “Panda”, will only effect 2%.

In a blog post concerning the announcement Googler Amit Singhal explains,

“Today we’ve rolled out this improvement globally to all English-language Google users, and we’ve also incorporated new user feedback signals to help people find better search results. In some high-confidence situations, we are beginning to incorporate data about the sites that users block into our algorithms.”

Feedback and data regarding undiscerning websites will be gathered using Google’s Personal Blocklist Chrome web browser extension, and will begin to alter search results from today. Google have also stated that they will “continue testing and refining the change before expanding to additional languages”.

Image courtesy of Rambling Traveler on Flickr.