As the established market leader of the search industry, Google is seen as the highest standard in search. However, the search engine has come under fire over the past few months for offering sub-par search results, littered with webspam and useless, sometimes even duplicate, information.
Unwilling to lose any more of its market share to rising competitor Bing, Google has been swift and forceful in its response to these criticisms. In multiple announcements and blog posts, representatives from Google have assured the frustrated public that the company takes the quality of its search results very seriously.
In February of 2011, Google introduced its strongest attack yet in the battle against webspam, launching major changes to its search algorithm. Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google, explained in a blog post that the updated algorithm will reduce the rankings of sites that offer users little to no value or simply copy content from other sites. By demoting these low-quality sites, also referred to as "content farms", Google places a preference on sites containing useful, original content. According to Cutts, the change impacts nearly 12 percent of queries, and will significantly affect the rankings of dozen of domains on a variety of keywords.
The effects of this announcement have reverberated throughout the SEO industry, hitting some harder than others. As the changes are primarily focused on informational queries, most businesses will not see a significant effect on their rankings, and high-level blogs and other informational sites may even see an improvement. Although SEO companies relying heavily on content farms for backlinks may see this news as reason for concern, companies using a varied approach to Internet marketing should continue to see strong rankings.
To the average user, these changes will most likely be seen as a significant improvement. With content farms cleared away from the top search results, users will be able to find more relevant information more quickly, benefitting both the user and the websites that move into the top rankings newly vacated by the content farms. More satisfying, relevant search results will ultimately lead to a healthier SEO industry, as an improved user experience is likely to encourage consumers to bring even more queries through the search engines.
As search engines continue to evolve to provide the best possible results, SEO professionals will need to remain alert in order to keep up with the changes and continue to offer their clients top rankings. SEO is more than just a numbers game. As the focus on quality increases, the art and science of SEO will need to merge, and we will see the true masters of the industry rise to the top.