Is Google's New Anti-Content Farm Algo Actually Better?
from the seems-like-it dept
We already posted Chas' interesting post about Google's attempt to "demote" content farms, and people are starting to explore whether or not the results are actually better. Alexis Madrigal, over at The Atlantic, used the fact that Google only rolled out the changes in the US and some remote proxies to compare results and noticed a clear improvement, at least in the search he tried.Granted, this is just one search for "drywall dust," but if this is even remotely indicative of how well the new algorithm works, we're all going to be tremendously impressed. The search via India led to seven sites that were producing low-quality or aggregated content, a photo of someone covered in dust, and a blog about an individual's remodel. The new algorithm search yielded very different results. Not only were there less content farms but two specialty sites and five fora made the list as well as a Centers for Disease Control page on the dangers of drywall dust. Having clicked through all 20 links, I can assure you that the information delivered by the new algorithm is much, much better.It's definitely still early, and I'm sure that there will be many similar comparisons, but it looks like some of my prediction from last summer in response to all sorts of public fretting about evil content farms may be coming true. As I noted at the time:
The situation that we're in right now is one where the current filtering mechanisms might not yet be good enough to distinguish quality content from crappy content. But that's a temporary state of affairs... If Google starts realizing that people do, in fact, find content farm content to be useless, that content will eventually get rated down, no matter how much they try to play SEO games.Nice to see that might actually be happening.
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Filed Under: content farms, search results
Companies: google
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(sorry, I figure I might as well get it out of the way in advanced. Maybe someone else can also get a response out of the way so that we can hopefully get to a more meaningful discussion sooner).
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i do hate censorship but content farms tend to get annoying, and never what im looking for, and its not like they are gone once google lowers their ranking
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After all, I'm sure that if you want the juicy bit of information held on that page then a focussed Google search will still find it for you - but don't expect it to come up in a relatively unrelated search any more.
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You are certainly right, though without knowing exactly how the Google algorithms work, that may not be the approach that proves most fruitful. Time will tell, and the battle will carry on!
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Depending on what they actually changed in the algorithm, I think that probably wouldn't matter. The algorithm is likely favouring forums because they hit its criteria for quality content, rather than the fact they're forums.
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The main deciding factor is user traffic and quality of backlinks.
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It'll work for a while...
What I find interesting is that Bing, while number two by a wide, wide margin, Google feels threatened enough to first change their image search to a (poor, in my opinion) copy of Bing's image search, followed by this new algorithim to improve search results.
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It's one thing to game the system but when the system is gamed so hard that 1/2 the search results are advertisement farms, then search is of less value for use.
Most were fairly easy to spot because they would have a whole mess of possible terms so you didn't have to open them to know what they were.
Still they limited your results because they took up space that should have been for relevant hits.
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Roseta stone?
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One step down. One more to go...
*sigh*
Wishful thinking on my behalf.
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Fake Websites and Other Idiocy
Internet searching could use improvement. It's very frustrating when doing research, lets say on a court decision, and many of the search results are sales pitches for a non-existent or irrelevant products.
In one real product search attempt, I entered the model number of a battery that I need and I got a lot of links for "battery sales", but it turned out that many of the sites did not even have the battery!
I also have yet to figure out how this happened, but I was looking up a product. As a result of a search, I had two tabs open on what appeared to be the same website, but the product price was different!!!
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But did it really work?
What I find most interesting is that Google claims the new algorithm will focus on not only "quality content" but content that provides "thoughtful analysis". Thoughtful analysis is a pretty subjective concept. I would be curious to know how something so ambiguous is defined in the algorithm.
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A lot better
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