Legal Internet Marketing Blog
The Internet is always evolving, which makes staying on top of your legal Internet marking game all the more important. If you have a web site that contains unique and useful content, the most recent Google algorithm update should work in your favor.
A New York Times article reports that Google has announced a significant change to its algorithm. The alteration is being made to help boost the rankings of high-quality web sites in Google search results and decrease the visibility of low-quality web sites. The update is said to be partially aimed at alleged content farms such as eHow and Answerbag. These sites create articles from popular search queries and put them on their sites to rise to the top of rankings and attract visitors. After receiving complaints from some users about allowing irrelevant and useless articles to garner high search results, Google decided it was time to update its algorithm.
Many Internet users out there may not realize that Google carries out almost 500 alterations to its algorithm each year. The majority of these changes are so minor that Google does not make it known to the public. The most recent algorithm update, however, is expected to affect 11.8% of search queries. Internet users will not miss this one.
Amit Singhal of Google stated, “This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites — sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other Web sites or sites that are just not very useful.”
On a similar note, Matt Cutts has said that the new algorithm will give better search engine rankings to web sites with original content, information that reflects “research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis” and more.
Interestingly, Google recently presented an extension to its Chrome browser allowing users to block specific web sites from showing up in search engine results. The point of doing this was to evaluate which sites users blocked to determine which web sites annoy users the most. Google did state that it did not use the results to change the algorithm. Nonetheless, the new algorithm did catch 84% of the most-blocked web sites.
Relevancy is why we use the Internet. We are looking for accurate and informative material that we can access easily and quickly. With Google responding more to user complaints about useless sites being on the first page, users can expect higher-quality sites to become more accessible. This is not to say, however, that high-quality sites do not currently have high search rankings. The point of the new algorithm is to filter out – and keep out – sites that contain duplicate content and material that does not really help a visitor.