Another step to reward high-quality sites

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Google has said before that search engine optimization, or SEO, can be
positive and constructive
—and we’re
not the only ones.
Effective search engine optimization can make a site more crawlable and make individual pages
more accessible and easier to find. Search engine optimization includes things as simple as
keyword research to ensure that the right words are on the page, not just industry jargon that
normal people will never type.

Ethical search engine optimization, also known as “white hat SEO”, often improves the usability
of a site, helps create great content, or makes sites faster, which is good for both users and
search engines. Good search engine optimization can also mean good marketing: thinking about
creative ways to make a site more compelling, which can help with search engines as well as
social media. The net result of making a great site is often greater awareness of that site on
the web, which can translate into more people linking to or visiting a site.

The opposite of ethical SEO is something called “black hat webspam”, or simply webspam (we say
“webspam” to distinguish it from email spam). In the pursuit of higher rankings or traffic, a
few sites use techniques that don’t benefit users, where the intent is to look for shortcuts
or loopholes that would rank pages higher than they deserve to be ranked. We see all sorts of
webspam techniques every day, from
keyword stuffing to
link schemes that attempt to
propel sites higher in rankings.

The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great
user experience and fulfill their information needs. We also want the people making great
sites for users, not just algorithms, to see their effort rewarded. To that end we’ve launched
Panda changes
that successfully
returned higher-quality sites in search results.
And earlier this year we launched a
page layout algorithm
that reduces rankings for sites that don’t make much content available “above the fold.”

In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The
change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing
quality guidelines.
We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another
improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. While we can’t
divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results
and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on
creating high quality sites
that create a good user experience and employ ethical SEO methods instead of engaging in
aggressive webspam tactics.

Here’s an example of a webspam tactic like keyword stuffing taken from a site that will be
affected by this change:

Of course, most sites affected by this change aren’t so blatant. Here’s an example of a site
with unusual linking patterns that is also affected by this change. Notice that if you try to
read the text aloud you’ll discover that the outgoing links are completely unrelated to the
actual content, and in fact the page text has been “spun” beyond recognition:

Sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep
analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than
ethical SEO; we believe they are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine
rankings.

The change will go live for all languages at the same time. For context, the initial Panda
change affected about 12% of queries to a significant degree; this algorithm affects about
3.1% of queries in English to a degree that a regular user might notice. The change affects
roughly 3% of queries in languages such as German, Chinese, and Arabic, but the impact is
higher in more heavily-spammed languages. For example, 5% of Polish queries change to a degree
that a regular user might notice.

We want people doing ethical search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization
at all) so they can focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites. As always, we’ll keep
our ears open for feedback on ways to iterate and improve our ranking algorithms toward that
goal.

Posted by
Matt Cutts,
Distinguished Engineer