Matt Cutts, Google’s main man for dealing with web spam, has announced on his blog today that a big algorithm change is now underway.  Google tweak their algorithm lots of times throughout the year, but it’s the big algorithm changes that get people nervous. And rightly so.

Look at the May Day algorithm change that took place last year. Google’s change hit a lot of sites that were ranking well for longtail keyword phrases. In a lot of cases these were sites that were doing nothing wrong, and were ranking well for a broad range of phrases, including many longtail ones.  Many sites saw a massive drop in traffic almost overnight, often by 50% or more.

Of course with all changes there are going to be winners as well as losers.

Here is what Matt Cutts had to say about this latest change…

My post mentioned that “we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.” That change was approved at our weekly quality launch meeting last Thursday and launched earlier this week.

This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.

And here is the link to his blog post

I think this is going to be interesting! Just look at the number of aggregator web sites that are out there where they just collect news and posts from around the web and bring it together. There are high profile and high ranking sites doing this. What is this change going to mean for them?

I can also think of a few sites from celebrities, that have good Pagerank, and pretty much all they do is pick up on topical stories, write a sentence or two of commentary, and publish it. The ‘original content’ is negligible and the bulk of it is ‘copied content’.

What is going to happen to sites like those? And more importantly, what is going to happen to YOUR web site?

This is likely to be a big shake up and it’s going to be interesting seeing who wins and who gets slapped by Google.  I guess all will become apparent over the next few weeks!

And most of all, I wonder what this update is going to end up getting called?

Most people know by now that Google have done a deal with Twitter to include real-time tweets in the Google search results (if you don’t know about this you can find out more here). And until recently Google have been very quiet about how they go about deciding who’s tweets are the most relevant and get ranked in the real-time results they show.

According to Amit Singhal of Google the system is not that different from the basic system they use for Pagerank. With Pagerank, part of the ranking formula is that a page is deemed to be important based on the number of pages that link to it, and in turn the pages that link those linking pages. So the link juice gets passed from one page to another down the chain. Each link to a page is like a vote for that page, and the more votes you get the more popular you are

With Twitter, Google are looking at the reputation of people. The more followers you have the higher your reputation, and just like Pagerank where a page with high PR passes a lot of link juice to a page with low PR, a Twitter user with a lot of followers and high reputation will pass a lot of that weight onto someone they follow, regardless of whether the person they are following is a new user or not.

But of course, being Google, they don’t tell the full story of how their algorithm works or all the factors they take into account. However, what does appear to be another factor that Google take into account is hashtags and it seems that these are something that can cause your tweets to be flagged as spam. A hashtag can help maximise the exposure of your tweet but they can also trip a filter that flags them as spam.

So, for now, if you want to stand a chance of getting your tweets into Google’s real-time seach results your best course of action is to get lots of followers, make sure that the followers you get are influential followers (ie. they have lots of followers) and go easy on the hashtags!

The question is though, with the fleeting nature of Google real-time results (gone after just a few minutes) is it really worth the effort, or should you enjoy Twitter for what it is and concentrate your efforts on more traditional SEO, where at least the results stay around for a lot longer! And if you would like help with SEO and getting your web site ranked higher in the search engines then get in touch with me for help

Source: technologyreview.com