I just saw a tweet from Matt Cutts announcing yet another change. We all know they do this over 300 times a year, but it's rare that they make an announcement. He says they are going after copycat sites and websites with weak content, and this will effect 2% of all websites. If you experienced a traffic dip this wee, be concerned! http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/algorithm-change-launched/
Although it only affects 2% of queries (and only 0.5% that will be "noticeable") that's still a heck of a lot of queries being affected.
How will this new algorithm determine the sites who are copying content and the ones who are making original content? What is the criteria for a site which copies? Would it be something like this: www.filehippo.com http://www.apphit.com/
I beleive the original issue was that copied content with a newer post date were ranking better then the original content which was posted before. So the date of the posted content will be the deciding factor. So better get your conten indexed as fast as you can
Although it affects 2%, that's 99% of DPers, and that's a good thing. Get rid of these garbage sites.
I want to put forward this discussion to the next level, will Google find people who spins the content, literally find the meaning of the contents of a page and find copies of it?
There goes article directories and scraper sites, but what about news site that copy and paste directly from the news wire?
If they will affect sites that copies content, then it will affect the sites that are autoblogs, that use wp robot, or other plugins like that?
Matt Cutts says what he has to say, and the Google spiders behave as they are programmed to do. Sometimes they wander at the same areas as Matt, sometimes not.
Most likely G is accomplishing this by developing a profile for each website. That profile would look at unique content versus non-unique. Cutts says that one factor is the ratio of the two. I suspect that they can now get an approximate 'writing style' from unique and would most likely assign it a style number. Now if they go to a 're-packager' site and find that it is primarily styles owned by others and is loaded with PPC ads, chances are that it's going to take a hit in rankings.
That happens now. It is unfortunate, but sometimes innocent people get hurt. I think the algo change is intended to increase the chances of getting it right.
That would rarely happen, but Google algorithms are really strong enough to identify original content
Its really good step to remove spam as it also irritate end users when they are searching important things for their use....it makes the search results more creditable....