Google changes search algorithm

Google has upped their game in their fight against content farms. They have just made what the company called a "subtle" change to their search algorithm that affected close to 12% of the queries.

According to the company, this update is meant to rank higher quality sites higher in the search engine results, and less useful sites that people complain about (the ones that resemble content farms) lower.

While they haven't really named this change as move against content farms and while I am still learning what those changes are (I am sure people will figure this out by end of next week, ha ha), I am wondering what you think about it or how can one even quantify the subjective quality of website usefulness?

I always believed that SEO does not revolve around backlinks and keywords ..it was more about making the site useful for the people. Perhaps Google is accounting the bounce rate for the site seriously.

That is an interesting statistic to look at - a bounce rate... time spent on the site, etc. I never really thought about it, but they could really utilize some of that knowledge through tools like Analytics, DFP Small Business (ad serving platform), etc.

Ya, I heard about this as well - my rankings haven't changed, but I've heard that article-rich sites have been hit hard - like Ezinearticles and a few others.

It totally affects our ranking on google all our keywords went to page 2..but luckily our keywords went up on yahoo and bing..

Seems like article directories took a hit due to the change.
I wonder whether writing articles and submitting it to directories would be any good from now on?

content is king for seo

Google algorithm is always changing. Checking your rank nor backlinks is really necessary.

Yes, Google have made lots of changes in the search algorithm as there are multiple aspects which are being included with in the search results.There are multiple other aspects which are coming up, right now its very difficult to predict how will it go. I too don't have any idea about how it will go ahead with the links which are having the top most position from few months.

Matt Cutt added-"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.”
But how will Google identify the original content ??