Google delived the news that low-quality content farms -- or sites that merely scrape original content or create lackluster content to get hits -- will be left in the weeds. Instead, Google's search will place original and higher-quality content at the top of its rankings.
Although the tweak to its search algorithm will only affect about 12 percent of queries, it will still make a difference in search results, Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts wrote on the Official Google Blog.
So, we’re very excited about this new ranking improvement because we believe it’s a big step in the right direction of helping people find ever higher quality in our results. We’ve been tackling these issues for more than a year, and working on this specific change for the past few months. And we’re working on many more updates that we believe will substantially improve the quality of the pages in our results.
So far, the new algorithm is only available in the United States, but should be available soon in other countries.
Already I looked up "Dogs" and "Cats" to see what kind of sites Google would spit out at me. For the most part, they were helpful sites.
Sure some were still sketchy, but at least most were sites I might learn something new. If Google continues to make changes like this, it may stay relevant and weather competition form upstarts like Blekko.
