In a victory for social SEO, Google’s assault on crappy content continues

We’ve given a fair bit of attention here to Google’s new algorithm changes, which reward high-quality sites while punishing the so-called content farms that cut and paste what’s in the news. Last night, Google unveiled the second and final (for now) phase of the “high quality” roll-out that will impact all English-language searches around the world. For anybody who publishes content to the web, the changes are BIG. As well as the global roll-out, Google says the new search formula will give higher weight to “user feedback signals.” This is hardly a surprise. Google has been trying to make its search results more socially relevant. And we suspect, though it’s not explicitly stated, that this means Google’s +1 feature will become a more significant feature for Google going forward.

The other big take-away is what it will mean for search rankings. Google estimated that the first round of “high quality” changes it made over the last month impacted roughly one in eight search results. That means at a bear minimum one “lesser quality” search listing was dropped from each page of search results. A good thing, we say. And what will Monday’s changes mean? Google’s Amit Singhal writes:

The impact of these new signals is smaller in scope than the original change: about 2% of U.S. queries are affected by a reasonable amount, compared with almost 12% of U.S. queries for the original change.

Here’s what it means for publishers and organizations now telling their stories. For brands-, companies- and organizations-turned-publishers these changes should mean more visibility for your stories. As I explained a few weeks ago, the authoritative voices on a given topic will be rewarded under the new system with greater visibility in the form of enhanced SEO. Monday’s changes mean the new quality-over-crap mantra will span the length of the entire English-speaking Web world, relegating even more content farms and middle men that really add nothing to a given story. We’ve already seen the changes boosting some of our stories here on SMI and the rankings too of some of the content clients we work with. And that was early days. The latest tweak should give even more prominence to quality online reporting.

Tags: Google, site content