Google Says Its Working On Search Engine Spam By Low Quality Sites

So, it seems that our rant about Google search becoming a pain to deal with, and a number of other such posts across the web haven’t got unnoticed. Google’s web spam head Matt Cutts posted a detailed blog post on the official Google blog the other day talking about some of that, and that they are working on it.

Matt says initially that contrary to popular belief, Google search results have improved over the years. In his own words:

Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness.

He also mentions that pure web spam in search results is half of what it used to be five years back.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Matt is right when it comes to pure web spam (mind you, here we are talking about absolute junk and not the low quality sites.) Spammy sites that I used to find years back in the search results are no longer to be found.

However, the pain isn’t those spam sites anymore. It’s the content farms like Demand Media, and Matt doesn’t forget to touch on them a bit later in his post:

As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content.

Right Matt, that’s exactly what we are talking about. And this is no doubt a bigger issue. Those crappy results make the search engine result pages look like trash and nothing else!

The good thing – Google is working on it. Matt says that they’ve launched two major algorithmic changes focused on such low-quality sites ion 2010. He also doesn’t shy away from using the phrase “content farms” repeatedly and says that they are working on the feedback they get each day.

At the end, Matt also clarifies that it’s a misconception that Google isn’t strict against spammy content on a site if it is serving Google ads. He says that buying Google ads has absolutely no effect on a site’s rankings in search results, and the site won’t be spared if it has spammy content, no matter how many Google ads it buys.

Overall, I think it’s a good sign that Google has taken notice of our grievances and working to improve the search engine in the way we wan’t it to be improved. Here’s looking forward to a better Google search experience in 2011.