Google Targets Low Quality Websites with Algorithm Update
Matt Cutts recently announced via Twitter that Google has made a minor algorithm update to reduce ‘low quality’ exact match domains. Basically Google is targeting and penalising low quality websites that are ‘piggy-backing’ off their URLs to gain high rankings in the search engine result pages (SERPs) for matching keyword queries. Traditionally if a Google user searches for ‘green widget’, the website [www.greenwidget.com] would appear highly in the SERPs based on the fact that the query term matched the URL exactly even if the website offers little value to a user.
This Google algorithm update is another significant signal that the user is the most important element of the search engine and that content and quality is king. In fact this is a vindication for the Enhance team. Although our URL does not specify our primary services (i.e. web design), we are pleased to see that Google is trying to disregard this and reward high quality user centric websites. Barry Schwartz, News Editor at Search Engine Land, released a concise informative piece on the algorithm update and highlighted that the update will affect 0.6% of the English-US search queries.