One of the greatest things about the World Wide Web is the fact that everyone has the freedom to publish almost anything that they want. That means that there is some really interesting content available online for anybody to access. However, it also means that there is a lot of very, very poor content online. Search engines, namely Google (no surprise there) are trying their best to make sure that the best content is appearing in the top search results for search queries.
In the past, certain search queries have often churned out results of pages with low quality, generic content that may accurate match the query, but is of such a low level of quality that nobody wants to read it. One example search, ‘ how to organise your desktop’, came out with 9 links to pages that had been generated by content farms, in the top 10 results. Content farms are website that churn out lots of low quality content just so that they get clicks through to the website, so that they can make money from advertising. Pages from content farms are absolutely not what people want to see when they are searching, which is why it’s a good thing that search engines have been trying to put a stop to this.
To put the effectiveness of the search engines’ efforts to the test, www.newsscientist.com asked computer scientist Richard McCreadie of the University of Glasgow to take a look at the situation. It was found that what search engines have been trying to do has actually worked. In order to test how effective Google and Microsoft have been, McCreadie tried 50 search queries that have been known to be a target for content farmers. One example of the 50 search queries is ‘how to train for a marathon’. The search queries were made in March ’11 and August ’11. Participants were then paid to review the pages that had turned up in the search results, and judge whether the content was good and useful or poor, low quality content that is being used to attract people to the page so that adverts can be displayed.
In the ‘how to train for a marathon example’ , the top 10 results in March ’11 were basically lists of very generic tips such as ‘invest in a good pair of running shoes’ and general low quality content. Amazingly, the same search in August ’11 turned up 10 completely different results, that were determined to be high quality information sources such as Runner’s World Magazine. A similar trend to this was found for all of the 50 search queries that were investigated. The findings suggest quite an impressive effort from search engines to get rid of low quality content from there high search results.
The biggest change that was made in an effort to cull low quality search results was the Panda update from Google. This improved Google search results by actually being able to distinguish between content that was low quality and content that would actually be good to read for people. Interestingly enough, a number of large organisations were caught out by this update, including Seed (a project from AOL) and eHow (a Demand Media website). Both organisations were said to have been getting large quantities of fairly generic content written for their sites so that they would rank higher in the Google search results, which was sniffed out by the Panda update and both sites were penalised for, having a significant negative impact on traffic to both sites.
In relation to SEO, this is another example of how good quality content is becoming increasingly important and how websites that are releasing low quality, repetitive and generic content are being punished. Overall search is definitely improving for the user, and it’s an important element of SEO to understand this.
For original article see: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228436.200-inside-search-engines-war-on-bad-results.html
