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Rosa Golijan

Google's working on saving 'good' websites

We've told you that Google's got a new algorithm that's specifically designed to force lousy, low-quality websites down in search rankings and we've seen that the algorithm is quite effective already.

But there's a darker side to things: Innocent and quality websites are being demoted as well — as if they're suffering some sort of cyber collateral damage — and now Google's gotta rush to save them.

WIRED reports that content farms — sites practically bordering on spam that are specifically tailored to attract Google searches — aren't the only ones who are rapidly dropping off the first few pages of search results. Regular websites such as Cult of Mac, an Apple-focused blog, are taking a hit as well and their staff can only speculate on the reasons:

[Cult of Mac’s editor Leander Kahney] said he suspects that Cult of Mac may have been downgraded because there are lots of sites that scrape and republish his content, which he never bothered to try to put a stop to.

While the search engine giant refrained from discussing specific websites or cases with WIRED, Google Fellow Amit Singhal did try to give some insight into why 'good' websites can sometimes drop down in search results after an algorithm change:

“We deeply care about the people who are generating high-quality content sites, which are the key to a healthy web ecosystem,” Singhal said. “However, we don’t manually change anything along these lines.”

“Therefore any time a good site gets a lower ranking or falsely gets caught by our algorithm — and that does happen once in a while even though all of our testing shows this change was very accurate — we make a note of it and go back the next day to work harder to bring it closer to 100 percent.”

“That’s exactly what we are going to do, and our engineers are working as we speak building a new layer on top of this algorithm to make it even more accurate than it is."

Google's "engineers are working as we speak." That's what it boils down to in the end and that's all we can really ask for, but we sincerely doubt that it'll comfort affected website owners who are seeing traffic to their sites "fall by one-third to one-half over the weekend" alone.

Related stories:

• Google declares war on lousy websites
• Google winning battle vs. lousy sites
• Google restoring 40,000 lost Gmail accounts

Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's a bit obsessed with Twitter, but still loves to be liked on Facebook.