This post was originally written by Ken Shafer, past SEO Manager for Apartments.com.
Following their announcement about social search, Google rolled-out an update to their algorithm aimed at cleaning out some of the clutter in their search results:
“Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”
Essentially, sites with huge editorial staffs create mountains of content, or simply copy it from other sites, and combine that with suspect linking strategies to fill up the search engine results pages (SERPs) with low-quality content that collects traffic and leads to massive amounts of ad impressions on those sites’ pages. What Google has done is take a step to get those links out of their SERPs.
What does this mean to me?
If our websites have good authoritative content and are being linked to by other trusted, reputable websites, this update should remove the spammy obstacles that might cause our links to get pushed down in Google’s SERPs. I know we’ve seen a slight, above-normal lift in traffic to Apartments.com since the update.
Don’t get me wrong here, people. You’re still going to have to employ strategies for getting this content linked-to from trustworthy sites and shared within popular social channels. Google is still using those signals as ranking factors. This just means that a few of the websites that may have been ranking above your content have been moved out of the way.
I’d love to hear your stories about any impact you’ve seen on your site’s traffic since the February 24th update. Please share in the comments section below!
