Last Friday, Google launched its largest attack on Web spam yet, issuing a search update that affected nearly 12 percent of all searches on its engine. Unfortunately, some innocent sites (including Digital Trends) got caught in the aftermath of Google’s content farm assault. One of those sites was Cult of Mac, an Apple blog.
Speaking with Wired, Googler Amit Singhal admitted that the process was not perfect. “We deeply care about the people who are generating high-quality content sites, which are the key to a healthy web ecosystem,” said Singhal. “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.”
Oddly enough, yesterday night, Cult of Mac was suddenly released from Google prison. “The site is miraculously back,” wrote Leander Kahney. “Everything looks great. I’m wondering if it was you talking to them, but it was back in the index pretty early this AM.”
So it seems that all is well for Cult of Mac. Hopefully Google is working to clean up the rest of the anomalies.
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