Google has hit back at growing criticism of the quality of its search results, with a blog post pledging to tackle “content farms” and admitting: “We can and should do better.”
The move has been seen as a threat to Demand Media, one such producer of low-cost articles and videos designed to suck up search traffic, which has just priced its initial public offering.
Matt Cutts, principal engineer and the public face of Google’s search quality team, said that while machine-generated “pure webspam” had fallen in the last few years, there has been a “slight uptick of spam in recent months”.
We hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content. We take pride in Google search and strive to make each and every search perfect. The fact is that we’re not perfect, and combined with users’ skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception. However, we can and should do better.
Parts of the blog post seemed to be directed at the European Union, which is investigating – amongst other potential abuses of its dominance – whether Google gives undue prominence to its customers.
One misconception that we’ve seen in the last few weeks is the idea that Google doesn’t take as strong action on spammy content in our index if those sites are serving Google ads. To be crystal clear:
- Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google;
- Displaying Google ads does not help a site’s rankings in Google; and
- Buying Google ads does not increase a site’s rankings in Google’s search results.
These principles have always applied, but it’s important to affirm they still hold true.
Bing and Yahoo’s team-up on search hasn’t yet made any significant dent in Google’s dominance of the search market. But while that is a cause for concern for some regulators, Google itself is realising the growing threat from social media – why search when you can ask Twitter or receive recommendations from your friends in your Facebook newsfeed?
Even if chatter about “Google Me” has died down, the management changes it announced yesterday are an opportunity for the search giant to redouble its efforts against the fast-growing competitive threat from Facebook.
