Whether you’re a typical Google user with your own website, or a practiced marketer or SEO, you may have noticed a bit of a change with Google’s results since the beginning of this month. According to Search Engine Land, Google has officially confirmed the news that there has been a change with how it assesses content quality. Basically, this is a Quality Update, just to make things simple.
There were a number of publishers who noticed that there where some changes to Google’s search results earlier this month. It had originally been confirmed that it wasn’t a Panda Update or anything like that. Before Google stated that it was a quality update, the change had been dubbed the “Phantom Update” by folks other than Google. But of course, now Google has come forward and told us that there was an update, and it focused specifically on quality. Basically, there were changes to the core ranking algorithm in terms of how quality signals were being processed.
So how is quality being assessed? Google still isn’t providing us with any details of how quality is being assessed at this point. Previously, Google quality for a page or site was determined by a wide range of individual factors, and perhaps now, some factors are being weighed more than before, while others are being weighed less.
So for those of you who noticed the change, and wondered if there were specific sites or pages that were being targeted, don’t worry, as the update does’t go after any class of site or sites. IT’s just an update to the overall ranking algorithm itself.