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On Thursday night, Google rolled out the changes that it announced last month to deal with "content farms"--companies that produce large amounts of inexpensive, search-engine-optimized content that have been frequently decried for low quality. Will there be sweeping changes in the way we view and navigate the Web? It's hard to tell just yet.
"In the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking--a change that noticeably impacts 11.8 percent of our queries--and we wanted to let people know what's going on," a post on the official Google blog explained. "This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites--sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites--sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on."
Part of this strategy involves a Chrome browser extension called Personal Blocklist.
But Demand Media, the recently-IPO'd company at the forefront of the "content farm" controversy, said on Friday that it's been unaffected by Google's algorithm change. "It's impossible to speculate how these or any changes made by Google impact any online business in the long term--but at this point in time, we haven't seen a material net impact on our Content and Media business," a blog post by Demand Media executive vice president Larry Fitzgibbons explained. But the Demand blog post nevertheless left open the possibility that its content could be affected in the future.
Indeed, Google said that changes may not be visible immediately, especially as the modifications to its algorithm are currently only affecting U.S. users. "We're very excited about this new ranking improvement because we believe it's a big step in the right direction of helping people find ever higher quality in our results," the Google blog post explained. "We've been tackling these issues for more than a year, and working on this specific change for the past few months. And we're working on many more updates that we believe will substantially improve the quality of the pages in our results."
What's at stake for Google here is the fact that critics have said content farms are making search results less useful and less relevant. With pressure from the "social search" trend fueled by Facebook's success and search rival Bing inching up in market share, it may be more pressing for Google than it appears at first glance.
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"In the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking--a change that noticeably impacts 11.8 percent of our queries--and we wanted to let people know what's going on," a post on the official Google blog explained. "This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites--sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites--sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on."
Part of this strategy involves a Chrome browser extension called Personal Blocklist.
But Demand Media, the recently-IPO'd company at the forefront of the "content farm" controversy, said on Friday that it's been unaffected by Google's algorithm change. "It's impossible to speculate how these or any changes made by Google impact any online business in the long term--but at this point in time, we haven't seen a material net impact on our Content and Media business," a blog post by Demand Media executive vice president Larry Fitzgibbons explained. But the Demand blog post nevertheless left open the possibility that its content could be affected in the future.
Indeed, Google said that changes may not be visible immediately, especially as the modifications to its algorithm are currently only affecting U.S. users. "We're very excited about this new ranking improvement because we believe it's a big step in the right direction of helping people find ever higher quality in our results," the Google blog post explained. "We've been tackling these issues for more than a year, and working on this specific change for the past few months. And we're working on many more updates that we believe will substantially improve the quality of the pages in our results."
What's at stake for Google here is the fact that critics have said content farms are making search results less useful and less relevant. With pressure from the "social search" trend fueled by Facebook's success and search rival Bing inching up in market share, it may be more pressing for Google than it appears at first glance.
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