Google reduces Internet pollution and spam-laden search results

Recently, Google announced that it was cracking down on spam and low quality websites created for the mere purpose of building links and gaming SEO.  Personally, I couldn’t be happier about the news since I’ve seen the amount of online spam increase exponentially over the years. The task has become almost unbearable, especially when analyzing conversations in the blogosphere.

I remember the good old days when you would run a search on a brand, company or topic and easily find relevant, quality content. Now we’re required to sift through hundreds, if not thousands, of results and weed out splogs, scraper sites, and web pages auto-generated by machines.

But thanks to some fine tuning of its search algorithm, Google is ridding the web of Internet pollution and filtering out the junk. Google estimates that the change will affect about 12% of search queries. On the top of its target list are content farms, sites that are generating volumes of content with the intent of artificially raising inbound links.

Unfortunately, Google’s new algorithm has impacted notable sites in the process. Credible resources such as Mahalo, Technorati and Examiner.com that aggregate and syndicate content from other reputable sites have been negatively affected. Although Google is working to resolve the problem, it really begs the question, “what constitutes the legitimate syndication of online content?”

Another nail in the spam coffin is Google’s new service called Personal Blocklist Extension on its Chrome browser. It lets users filter out results from specific sites directly from the list of search results. This is the first time Google will allow users to automatically block all results from a site, a similar approach taken by search engine startup, Blekko.

Both of these efforts by Google are welcome news for people searching for information online, as well as those of us who are developing digital content. As communicators, this means the high-quality editorial content we’re creating will no longer compete against spam in search results. And while we can’t do much about the polluted digital landscape, it’s reassuring to know that we can circumvent a good portion of it through Google’s improved search algorithm.