Google Takes on the Link Farms

It appears that Google is successfully taking on the link farms that have plagued us for the last several years. Their new algorithm has deprecated many sites, witnessed by the complaints at Google Help and other sites, and hopefully will put an end to the link-farm scourge.

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.
Finding more high-quality sites in search

As with many people I'm both excited about - and concerned about - the new Google Chrome Blocklist extension. Let's hope this extension is made availabe to other browsers and that it cannot to easily be used for evil as well as good.