Google has recently implemented a major overhaul to its search algorithm. The search engine behemoth has said it wants to promote sites with high-quality content, and to bury those with low-quality content.

In a post on the Google Blog, Google Fellow Amit Singhal and Principal Engineer Matt Cutts defined low-quality sites as those which ”are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful”, while high-quality sites typically contain ”original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

Google is thought to tweak its algorithm frequently, but the changed search results are often not significant enough to be picked up on. However, this latest move means that 11.8% of queries will get meaningfully different results from the search engine than before.

The overhaul by Google comes after releasing its Personal Blocklist extension for Chrome users on 14 February, which allows users to manually block low-quality websites. The search giant is still monitoring the feedback from Blocklist, but the Google blog post reported that 84% of ”the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension” are now addressed by the new change.

Google’s adapted results are currently only applicable to search results in the US, but plans to roll out the changes in the UK are underway.

Tags: Amit Singhal, content farms, Google algorithm, Google Blog, Matt Cutts, quality content

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