Another step to reward high-quality sites

The search engine with highest impact on the web, Google, always has promoted search engine optimization, or SEO, as positive and constructive. Effective search engine optimization improves the quality of a web site by easing crawling and optimizing individual pages to become faster to find. Search engine optimization includes things as simple as keyword research to ensure that the right words are on the page, not just industry jargon that normal people will not search for.

Different types of SEO techniques produce varios results. SEO experts usually differentiate these as “white hat”, “grey hat” and “black hat”.

“White hat” SEO often improves the usability of a site, helps create great content and makes web sites faster. This is good for  users, search engines and web developers. Good SEO means also good marketing: thinking about creative ways to make a site more compelling, which can help with search engines and social media. The result of optimizing a web site is often translates into more people linking to and visiting a site.

The opposite of “white hat” SEO is called “black hat” web spam. In the pursuit of higher rankings and traffic, some web sites use techniques that don’t really benefit users. Web spammers look for shortcuts to higher rankings and traffic. Web spam techniques include: keyword stuffing, link schemes and other “innovative” techniques aiming at boosting web reputation and attracting advertisers.

Google has decided to change the SEO algoritms in favor of the “white hat” SEO optimization and the real quality websites. Therefore it introduced fresh ranking changes that aim to help searchers find sites with good quality content and that provide a great user experience.

So, Google has launched Panda changes that successfully returned higher-quality sites in search results. Also, earlier in 2012 Google launched a page layout algorithm that reduces rankings for web sites that don’t make much content available “above the fold.”

In addition, few days ago Google launched an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The new formula decreases rankings for sites that are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. The new algorithm reduces web spam effectively and promotes high quality content.

Webmasters who are focused on creating high quality web sites that create a good user experience, offer useful content and employ “white hat” SEO methods will ultimately benefit.

Webmaster who use web spam SEO tactic like keyword stuffing or unusual linking patterns are expected to be affected by this change.

The SEO algoritm change went live for all languages at the same time. For context, the initial Panda change affected about 12% of queries to a significant degree; this algorithm affects about 3.1% of queries in English to a degree that a regular user might notice. The change affects roughly 3% of queries in languages such as German, Chinese, and Arabic. Heavily-spammed languages are much highly impacted, such as Polish .

Google’s goal is to encourage webmasters to employ “white hat” SEO in order to create rich, useful content and web resources.