Posted on

Google Lays Down The Law Against Content Farms

In a blog post today on Google’s official blog, the search giant is announcing some major algorithm changes to its search engine that is perhaps the most unnoticeable change, but one that is going to improve the quality of search results from Google.

Google is targeting content farms, low quality websites whose main goal is to rank well in search traffic with useless content that is usually copied from websites with the original content.

In the blog post Google did not outline the exact changes but they did throw around some numbers, saying that it should only impact 11.8% of search queries in Google. Google’s code changes will only roll out in the U.S. with plans to roll out worldwide over time, but it will affect the ranking of many sites on the web.

“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,” says the two Googlers in the blog post.

The upcoming changes are sure to have many up in arm, complaining that their website is unfairly ranks, but in most cases Google will have a fair rank of the owners website.

It’s no objection that Google’s search engine is the best in the world, but this most popular search ending has been plagued by the SEO practices of content farms, allowing these sites to rank at the top in most common searches. It will be a huge step for Google to put an end to these content farms. It is an important step for making their millions of users feel safe and getting the highest quality web search results that they deserve.

Posted on

How To Block a Website in Google Search

Google is making an attempt to crowdsource against spam with Personal Blacklist.

Personal Blacklist adds an option under any Google search result that lets users remove an entire website result from the search. Additionally, it adds a link at the bottom of the search results pages so you can still see the results that were blocked. Users can also manage the block list by clicking on the extension icon.

  1. To get started with the plugin, make sure you have downloaded and installed Google Chrome.
  2. After you have set up Google Chrome, go here to get the plugin.
  3. As soon as you have installed the plugin, you will get a red button on your Google Chrome toolbar. This is the populated list of websites that you have blocked.
  4. If you want to block a website, make a Google Search of anything that you want. Below the title and description you will see “Block [website]” to the right of the similar button. Click this to add the website to your block list and any website that is relevant to your block will be removed from the list.
  5. To remove or edit any blocked entry, select the red icon on the Chrome toolbar and all the blocked content will be populated into a list with easy remove/edit functions.
Posted on

Google Chrome Extension to Block Websites From Search Results

In a release Google today you can now block websites from search results with a new experimental Google Chrome extension that attempts to find and block the content farm websites.

Personal Blacklist, adds an option under any Google search result that lets users remove an entire website result from the search. Additionally, it adds a link at the bottom of the search results pages so you can still see the results that were blocked. Users can also manage the block list by clicking on the extension icon.

This Google Chrome extension is centered around suppressing the content farms, websites that create low-quality content that rely on search for traffic. Google in-turn acquires this information that you block and sends it to Google where it could become apart of Google’s search algorithm.

To put it simply, Google is looking into using blocked data to implement and control content farms. Google has had trouble targeting these content farms and by using users to get the data they can make a more significant impact.

I like the idea of user submitted feedback for content farm sites but it can easily be exploited by hackers with multiple computers hitting random sites throughout the day. I like the idea of, after a certain amount of hits it goes into a moderation queue where it is analyzed by Google workers to see if the site is truly a content farm.