A couple weeks ago, Google made the official announcement that they are once again making changes to their search algorithm. While changes to the algorithm often go by undetected, this most recent change has generated a lot of buzz as it will affect almost 12% of Google’s search results.  Listening to the needs of their customers, Google made one of their biggest decisions to date in order to give users the most relevant answers to their queries as efficiently as possible.

With their users wanting to see fewer low quality sites in their search results, Google will now reduce rankings for sites that provide little value to consumers and copy content from other sites. At the same time, the new algorithm will reward sites with unique and relevant content (more so than before). These changes attempt to cut down on websites utilizing content farms – a technique often used by spammers and Black Hat SEO writers that produce large amounts of content, but with irrelevant information, that are written to satisfy the search algorithms – not the consumer. These sites often direct customers to advertisements as well rather than the useful information they were searching for originally. (more…)