Google Changes Website Rankings to Increase 'High Quality' Content

Monday, February 28, 2011

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    Outside of the Google Headquarters (Ozaking/flickr)

  • “ There was a case with J. C. Penny was in the New York Times a while ago, and they were paying a company that was actually paying other sites to include links with keywords so that when you search for things that might come on J.C. Penny that would actually manipulate the sites and that’s what they say as crossing the line.
    — Jim Colgan

Google is changing the way it ranks websites in search results, by changing its famous, mysterious algorithm so that sites deemed "intuitively low quality" get lower rankings. Takeaway digital editor Jim Colgan looks at what's changing and why Google is doing it now.

Google introduced that change last Thursday and we spoke to the head of the company's web spam team, Matt Cutts, along with Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of the new book, "The Googlization of Everything."

There's an interesting analysis of the sites that have been affected over at Quora and SearchEngineLand. Turns out Demand Media's eHow has not suffered as expected (in fact it may have benefited), but Yahoo's user-generated Associated Content took a dive in rankings.

 

Guests:

Jim Colgan

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