Quality content on your website is more important than ever

Details: Thursday, 14 April 2011 20:53; Hits: 1355

2011 is going to be a year of change for many search engine optimizers. It is not enough that Google is seriously beginning to crack down on Content Farms it is now also changing its algorithm to further improve its automatic ability to detect spam and duplicate content.

For those who are new to SEO spam content is usually machine generated text (quite a lot it) which barely makes sense but which contains syntax which, grammatically works and which is artificially boosted on search engines, attracting traffic and making money from advertising and Google Ads.

For most of the past year Google focused on improving the end-user experience in terms of speed and quality. Google Caffeine was the first step, followed by the introduction of the real-time web in search, Google Instant and even PR tweaks, all of which were designed to improve the quality of search results for the end user and deliver more relevant web pages when he conducted a search.

The next step is a crackdown on those who skirt the space between white and black hat SEO with grey hat SEO techniques which deliver poor quality content to searchers.

In an official Google blog post Matt Cutts, Google’s Principal Engineer on search posted a blog post where he unequivocally said that:

As we’ve increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well. To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on inpidual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments. We’ve also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010. And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.

The new “document level classifier” is far more sensitive to spam content and grey hat SEO techniques. Google have not yet said what the exact nature of the penalty will be for sites which are gauged to contain spam content but, at a guess, they will be relegated to pages well beyond the top 50 Google results which means they are as good as banned.

One misconception that we’ve seen in the last few weeks is the idea that Google doesn’t take as strong action on spammy content in our index if those sites are serving Google ads. To be crystal clear: Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google; Displaying Google ads does not help a site’s rankings in Google; and Buying Google ads does not increase a site’s rankings in Google’s search results.These principles have always applied, but it’s important to affirm they still hold true.

Make sure that the content on your website is absolutely rock-solid in terms of originality and quality and prepare for a rocky 2011 SEO year.