Search giant Google say's it's taking a stab at raising the bar on search results by penalizing Websites that offer copycat content and sites that are clearly trying to game the company's search algorithm. Google announced changes to its search algorithms, in an effort to improve rankings of Websites offering high quality content. The move is set to impact over 10 percent of U.S. search results and is widely seen as a direct attack on content farms that generate articles based on popular search queries.
"This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites -- sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful," Google engineers wrote on the company's official blog. "At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites -- sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on," the engineers explained.
The search algorithm update has been in the works for over a year and Google says it has been working on this specific change for the past few months. The update does not rely on user-generated information from Google Personal Blocklist Chrome Extension, which was launched last week.
Google changes its search algorithm on a regular basis (around 500 changes per year), though most changes are minor and unnoticeable to most users; this time however, the changes will impact just under 12 percent of U.S. search results.
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