Google's Matt Cutts recently announced at SMX Advanced in Seattle that Google will soon roll out the third major update to its Payday l...
Google's Matt Cutts recently announced at SMX Advanced in Seattle that Google will soon roll out the third major update to its Payday loan algorithm. Last month, we saw the introduction of the second iteration of the Payday loan algorithm, along with Panda 4.0. For spammy websites, the day of reckoning has come, for Google has now rolled out the promised Payday loan 3.0 which, although is unrelated to Panda or Penguin, aims at cutting down on even more spammy search queries.
The Payday Loan Algorithm
To give you a quick reminder of what the Payday Loan Algorithm is - God knows there are more algorithms today than search engines ever were - it is an update that is intended to target "very spammy queries." No, it's not another version of Penguin of Panda. In fact, Payday Loan is unrelated to either of the two.
Introduced early in June 2013, the first version of this algorithm was designed to laser-target the very spammy websites. It didn't have a big overall impact like the Panda or the Penguin. Rather, it hit a very small percentage of sites operating spam - and hit them pretty hard.
Hence, Google took some really "spammy queries," and hit sites that came up as search results. These queries were typically those that got associated with excessive web spam. Examples of such sites include insurance, accident claims, payday loans, and so on. Hence, the name "Payday Loan."
Payday Loan 2.0
Introduced less than a month ago, Version 2.0 continued what the original algorithm had started. with more focus on spammy sites instead of queries. Again, the overall impact was nominal, but sites in the porn, pills/steroids, gambling, and casino businesses got hit hard.
It only impacted about 0.2% of English search queries, although the percentage was higher for certain languages such as Turkish.
Payday Loan 3.0
This time around, the focus has again shifted to spammy queries. Matt Cutts explained that this update goes after different signals. Payday 3.0 specifically targets spammy queries, versus spammy sites. What exactly does that means is not immediately clear. But the types of queries this targets includes terms like "payday loans" (again), "casinos", "viagra", "gambling" and other forms of highly spammy queries.
There is no word yet on what percent of queries will be affected with version 3.0. But we reckon that, unless you’re running a site in a niche that Google would consider to be ‘very spammy’, there isn't much you need to be personally worried about with this update.
Live in peace :)
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