The New York Times published an article over the weekend about the new changes to Google’s algorithm that determine search engine rankings. According to the article, 12% of websites could be effected. This sounds scary, but if your site has original, fresh content with good site architecture and high-authority inbound links – you have nothing to worry about it.
Certainly, the new changes will penalize or even eliminate many blatantly cloned or scraped sites. This is great news for site owners.Let’s hope that sites with nothing but stale content and massive Adsense are truly pushed down the SERPs.
But the real question remains: How will the Google algorithm revision effect the large well-known content farms like about.com, ehow.com or associatedcontent.com? Does the enormous amount of Google Adsense dollars generated on these sites factor in to the new math behind the algorithm?
To the credit of these content sites, they do produce original content that address search queries directly. But if Google is truly looking for high-quality content over articles produced in massive quantities by mostly non-experts, these sites come up lacking. Will high quality niche sites or blogs get a rankings boost over the content farm sites?
We should know the answers to these questions within a few weeks as the data is assimilated from the new search engine results. If Google’s algorithm has truly been improved, ehow.com, about.com and associatedcontent.com will take a hit at the expense of higher relevancy sites. If your site or blog has excellent content, white-hat SEO and good links – you may be one of the winners.