New Google Search Algorithm Affecting Results for Many Sites

Last week Google made some changes to its search algorithm that affected the rankings in search results for many websites. The tweak was designed to improve results for users, but it affected 12% of Google’s results, which has a huge impact on businesses who rely on search engine traffic to their websites.

A Google company blog about the change, posted by Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker, announced that “Our goal is simple: to give users 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. Recently we’ve heard from our users that they want to see fewer low quality sites in our results.”

Most of the time when Google makes changes to its search algorithm, nobody notices. Last week’s changes affected a large enough percentage of sites that the changes were noticed almost immediately.