Google changes on the horizon

It’s been reported on the WebmasterWorld thread that there are going to be some major changes to Google in the near future:

We’ve been working on this issue for a long time, and made some progress. These efforts started long before the recent spat of news articles. I’ve personally been working on it for over a year. The central issue is that it’s very difficult to make changes that sacrifice “on-topic-ness” for “good-ness” that don’t make the results in general worse. You can expect some big changes here very shortly though.

There’s a lot of speculation as to what this is going to be including suggestions that it may be improvements to the AdWords verification process to reduce the amount of spam, but this is purely speculation.

What we hope will happen

This is still speculation, but with the changes happening over the past twelve months, it’s looking very likely that the changes will affect the websites appearing in the index. The quality of indexed websites has been improving steadily since Google was founded, but there are still some significant problems with spam in the index.

With this in mind, we hope that there are improvements in the following areas:

• Content farms: We know that Matt Cutts and Google have made it clear that they’re a bit sick of webspam, particularly in the form of “content farms”. Places where freelance writers are providing low-quality content of no real value to users. We strongly recommend that if you do use an article site, to hire writers who will provide quality content. A high-quality and more expensive article will be more lasting than a dozen low-quality, cheap articles.
• Sites that are good for the user: following the post last week, we’re standing by the fact that SEO and UX go hand-in-hand. We hope to see improvements which means sites that are easy-to-use begin to increase in rankings.
• Devaluing of spammy links: it’s frustrating, but some spammy sites are still appearing in the SERPs and in some cases cheap link building works. We hope that there aresignificant improvements to Google’s algorithm, spotting these sites and penalising them.
• Easier to use SERPs: the continuing improvements to the search engine results pages have been good and bad. We hope to see these pages continue to improve for the user.

How to keep up with the changes

We’re going to be reporting any importing changes and will be updating our strategies to reflect these strategies to make sure our service is still second to none. So, subscribe to our RSS feed to keep up to date and make sure you regularly read other blogs such as The Official Google Blog and SEOmoz.

Written by Jason John Mills