Bye Bye Content Spam – Google Launches Spam Fighting Algorithm

If you run an information resource website or even house a blog, the likelihood is that you will have be ‘scrapped’ at one time or another. Scrapping is an increasingly popular practice carried out by content farms and low quality sites intent on stealing good content rather than writing it themselves. This practice saves time and boosts rankings, helping to generate advertising revenue, make affiliate sales and build a popular piece of web real estate. One major issue with scrapping and copying is that these sites can get ahead of you pages in the SERPs even though you wrote the content to begin with. It’s totally unethical and really has a negative affect on honest web business owners.

It’s illegal, yes, but almost impossible to monitor and prosecute. I mean if someone rips off this article tomorrow and sticks it up on there site, aside from a few threatening emails what else can I do? This is where Google come in. Matt Cutts has had enough and has stepped in with a super algorithm to save us from content spam in the search engines. The positive result is a more ethical search. A searcher will more than likely be presented with the site that wrote the original content rather than a site that simple scrapped or copied the content. Low quality sites will also be targeted in this clean up – low quality as in sites that just steal bits and rewrite stuff in a very substandard manner.

In Matt Cutts own words the changes will affect search as follows:

“This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that
wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.”

If you are guilty of scrapping or copying then your number is up…bye bye content spammers!