Yesterday Matt Cutts posted that Google has changed their search algorithm to focus more on original content. Below is an excerpt from his post:
My post mentioned that “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.” That change was approved at our weekly quality launch meeting last Thursday and launched earlier this week.
This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.
Matt’s post summary is the short version from his post on Google’s offical blog entitled “Google search and search engine spam“. This is great news as it seems like the beginning of Google trying to remain the #1 search enginge and fight off what seems like a series of attacks and competition from new search engines and startups such as Wolframalpha, Blekko and the continue traffic increase of Microsoft Bing.
Note, Matt stated that the Google search algorithm change will only affect 2% of search queries but don’t let the small number fool you. Google is under fire about providing relevant content to the answers of search quires and startups like Quora does.
My recommendation for you is to keep providing good, original content and for Google to keep updating their search algorithm or keep buying startups that are answering the questions that people use to search Google for.
