Bits: Google tries to reduce the Rank of low quality sites

1: 18 pm | Updated added quote from analyst.

Google said late Thursday that it had made to its algorithm a big change in an effort to improve the placement of high-quality Web sites in its search results — and reduce the visibility of low quality sites. While the company did not say so explicitly, the change appears to be addressed in the so-called contained companies like eHow, Answerbag, generating articles based on popular searches so that they rise to the top of the rankings and attract clicks.

Google has faced criticism from some users to allow articles that are not useful for clearly visible in search results. That has now changed, according to the company.

"This update is designed to reduce the rankings to low quality sites — sites that are of little value add for users, copy the contents from other websites or sites that are not only very useful," Amit Singhal, Google fellow and Matt Cutts, who directs the Google team fighting spam, wrote in a blog post. "At the same time, it will provide better rankings for sites with high quality — content and information sites, such as research, in-depth reports, original and thoughtful analysis, etc."

Google said that it makes changes to its algorithm about 500 a year, but most are so small that the company does not announce them. This affects 11.8% of search queries, Google said, so it is large enough to significantly alter the results that you see.

Google's announcement does not mention content farms. But Mr. Cutts talked in recent weeks, Google said the problem and was working on change of algorithm for solving the problem. "In general, there are some farms contained that I think would be fair to call it spam, in the sense that the quality is so poor that people complain," said in a recent interview.

While the content of these sites can be useful, much of it is closer in value to the article by eHow on how to make friends in College, which includes tips like "consider joining a sorority or fraternity" and "remember having a good time, smile and laugh". Many of the articles on these sites are formulated as how-tos, and even after the change on Thursday still reveal how best results in searches for how to do something — if someone phrases of a search query in this way, you might want to read an article. In the blog post, Google said that the algorithm updated rewards high-quality sites, so that the effect will become clear over time.

Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land and an expert in the field, said Google's action "seem to be a P.R. move is a move to improve relevance."

Last week, Google introduced an extension to its Chrome browser that people can use to block certain sites appearing in search results and said it would investigate what sites people block to figure out that those bother users. Thursday, Google said that it did not use the data to change the algorithm, but that the new algorithm caught 84 percent of most blocked websites.