Real Estate SEO Blogs by Key Yessaad

This is fantastic news…

“Content Farms” on the internet use advanced Search Algorithms that add content to their websites from the internet and grow in scale to squash all those who really have Organic Web Strategies. Many have accused these well known websites, Demand Media, AOL, Mahalo and the Huffington Post of such tactics. I am very excited about the new algorithm update that Google released and here are some of my reasons for it:

1. 12% of the Web is going to be affected by this change – 12% of content is a huge number. Everyone who uses the internet has come across fake websites that seem to have irrelevant content for the sake of ranking alone – this initiative will help reduce these spam sites tremendously. Here is an example: Google recently penalized Overstock.com and JC Penney in its search results after the companies were found to have set up fake websites that linked to their own, causing Google’s algorithm to rank them higher.

2. This change is about honoring Content – in Real Estate for example everyone shares the same content using IDX Feed; Once a listing appears in the MLS all the Syndicators and all the IDX Members get the same content; But who got the listing in the first place? The Agent of Course – but they rarely show up in the search. This change will help agents choose to enhance their listing descriptions, pictures, and videos in their website and it will be viewed as richer content. I called this back to the basics of Marketing 101!

3. “Content Farms” are in the business of advertising and selling backlinks; they weaken the internet because they have scale. Page by Page and Article by Article is what the Internet is all about; this initiative gives the little guy a chance to compete organically; and I welcome it. So start adding content, solutions, and marketing tools to help your customers – blogging original content is going to be honored a little more!

For those you who wish to read Google’s Blog Release – here it is:

Finding more high-quality sites in search

2/24/2011 06:50:00 PM

Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.

It’s worth noting that this update does not rely on the feedback we’ve received from the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension, which we launched last week. However, we did compare the Blocklist data we gathered with the sites identified by our algorithm, and we were very pleased that the preferences our users expressed by using the extension are well represented. If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84% of them, which is strong independent confirmation of the user benefits.
So, we’re very excited about this new ranking improvement because we believe it’s a big step in the right direction of helping people find ever higher quality in our results. We’ve been tackling these issues for more than a year, and working on this specific change for the past few months. And we’re working on many more updates that we believe will substantially improve the quality of the pages in our results.

To start with, we’re launching this change in the U.S. only; we plan to roll it out elsewhere over time. We’ll keep you posted as we roll this and other changes out, and as always please keep giving us feedback about the quality of our results because it really helps us to improve Google Search.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer

Happy Blogging – Key Yessaad, Real Estate Internet Strategist