Originality is King
On Friday last week Google’s much talked about algorithm change came into effect in the U.S.
The purpose of the change was to give high quality content more importance when calculating a site’s search engine rankings.
Here’s a direct quote from Google’s Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal who published a blog post about the changes last month:
“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. 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.”
While this update was labelled by many in the industry as the “content farm” update, it may not just be these high volume, low quality content sites that are badly affected.
The idea behind this change is to make the web a better experience for everyone so when you search for information on a specific topic, you get high quality information without having to look through lots of search result pages to find it.
In the U.S. where the update is now live, almost 12% of search queries have been affected by this algorithm change, so it’s had a sizeable impact.
How will your site be affected?
For as long as I can remember, people in the SEO industry have been stressing the importance of unique, relevant and high quality content. Google doesn’t want its search engine results clogged up with poorly written articles of no use to the person searching.
If you’ve cut corners with your own site content and had it written purely for SEO purposes rather than your target market, you could be in for a drop in rankings when this change comes to the UK.
Even if you’ve legitimately syndicated content from sites such as ezinearticles.com you could still be penalised; as the quote from Google above says, they’re looking for “original content and information”.
What can you do about it?
The answer to this question is simple; start generating your own unique, high quality content.
Don’t become focused on purely writing for the purpose of improving your search engine rankings; think about your target audience and what they want to read about.
If you don’t have the time or skills to write your own high quality content, you can hire a copywriter to do it for you and start making your way back up the search engine rankings again if your site suffers a dip as a result of this change.
At a time when I am just re-doing my website and about to undergo finessing the SEO… I now have to pause.
This is actually news to me. How are the algorithms formed? Is Metadata important?
Music to my ears!
For a while I had a look into the world of article marketing and an awful lot of the affiliate marketers are churning out stuff on Ezine merely to promote a product. When you find it in Google, you know its going to be trash. Let’s hope this gets supressed.
At a recent 4Networking event, I suggested to Deborah a photographer she take pictures of everyone. After initial reluctance she did it and the subsequent response on Facebook was far more than any words could achieve. Good content that promoted her, 4N and extended the networking into Facebook.
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Google have really hit a good point on this one getting rid of low quality and duplicate content and I really do recommend to our clients they hire a copywriter to take care of a lot of there content. Trying to convince them of that is a tough job – perhaps this latest update will help to prove the point.
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Thanks for your comments Martin. I saw an email this morning from ezinearticles.com with a number of changes to their submission guidelines so I can only assume this is a direct response to the recent algorithm change.
Hi Antonio, thanks for your reply. The algorithms are a closely guarded secret and are thought to be made up of around 200 different factors, all of which affect your search engine ranking.
Meta titles and descriptions are important, not so much in terms of SEO but in attracting clicks through to your site from the search engine results pages.
If you’d like to know more I’ve written blog posts on meta titles and descriptions
Thanks Sean and I really hope you’re right. I work with a lot of small business owners who don’t see the value in good copywriting but this latest update should help as you say.
It seems many SMEs are happy to pay for website design but don’t appreciate the value in good content and opt to do it themselves with varying results.
Google Clamps Down on Poor Quality Content…
This post looks at the recent Google algorithm change which is designed to reward high quality content. It tells you more about the reasons behind it and how it could affect a lot of popular websites worldwide….
This sounds like long-awaited good news. As a PR and copywriter, I have been urging people for years to get good copy written for their websites. Too often we hear the phrases “that costs money” or “I can do that myself”. Such cost-cutting really shows on poorly-written, dreary sites and I can only hope that people wake up and realise that words work wonders!
Thanks for taking the time to comment Paul. I totally agree with your point – many business owners seem to be happy to invest in website design but then cut corners with the content. Let’s hope that starts to change.
All I can say is good, there’s to many cowboys out. I think the age of the spammer is starting to come to a end.
User experience is the base for this kind a algorithm change form google and to me its a very good step to clean up the SERP results. From user point of view, if you are not getting the relevant information, what you are looking forward to, the value of the search result reduces and hence Google’s reputation.
The implementation of this new algorithm as per my knowledge as of now just implemented for USA only. Its an alarm for rest of the world as well. Its highly recommended to talk with your seo company and cross check the work they have done and take proper steps to solve the issue.
Thanks for the great post.
Sandy
Hi Sandy, thanks for taking the time to comment. I totally agree that ultimately this change will benefit Google’s end users – it may just take some time to settle down and work as it should.
Just a quick update to this post – the algorithm change has now been rolled out worldwide.
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