Lollipop Local

In its battle against the content farms, which seem to be taking over the search engine results pages, new Google searching algorithms have been launched in the US which will noticeably impact 11.8% of queries.

Google wants to ensure that searchers receive the best quality content to answer their queries and this goal has been seriously impeded by the explosion of low-quality sites with articles and posts written in poor English which add little value to the search pages and are designed purely to achieve a high ranking for advertising sites.

It has long been a bugbear of mine that article marketing campaigns can be outsourced to countries with English as a second language for a fraction of the costs required to utilise a native English speaking writer. And Google compounded the problem by seeming to reward sites using these nonsensical essays in Spinglish with high ranking on their results pages.

After the recent link building crackdowns against big companies like JC Penny, Google are implementing strategies designed to help both searchers and marketers to get a more rewarding experience on the internet.

Hubspot sums it up really well

“As a searcher, you should have less garbage results to wade through in order to find a decent result to your query. As a marketer, you no longer have to compete with low-quality scraper sites and content farms for high results on the Search Engine Results Pages.”

And it looks as if these measures are beginning to show results already. Alex Madrigal at The Atlantic conducted two searches for the term ‘drywall dust’ – one using the new US Google search and another utilising the system currently still enabled for the rest of the world. His results showed that content farms and aggregator sites had significantly less effect using the new searching algorithms.

If you want your business to be found online today, you need to ensure that, in addition to good SEO, your site includes regular updates with interesting and engaging content which is relevant to your industry. This will encourage traffic and interaction by users who want to share good quality information by linking to your site through social media.

Which brings me on to another recent change to the Google Searching Algorithms, as confirmed by Matt Cutts on a Google Webmaster video.

Social Media sharing will become part of the basis for ranking and, in the meantime, we can only hope that small businesses in the UK will start to benefit from these new search algorithms sooner rather than later.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 1st, 2011 at 11:46 am and is filed under Social Media and SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.