Last month, Google rolled out two major updates to its algorithm around the same time – new versions of the famous Panda update and the “Payday Loans” update, which is one of its ways of fighting spam.
A newer version of the latter began rolling on Thursday afternoon.
@BtotheMcG it's rolling out now!
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) June 12, 2014
Google’s head of webspam Matt Cutts announced the update at the Search Marketing Expo in front of a packed house.
Here's what the #smx Q&A session looked like from the stage yesterday: pic.twitter.com/A7kSb90oPL
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) June 12, 2014
“Matt Cutts explained that this goes after different signals,” recounts Barry Schwartz at SMX sister site Search Engine Land, who was in attendance. “The 2.0 version targeted spammy sites, whereas version 3.0 targets spammy queries.”
It will target queries like “payday loans,” “casinos,” “viagra,” etc., he says.
According to this recap of Cutts’ announcements (as tweeted by Cutts himself), he referred to the new update as Payday Loan 2.0 with last month’s being 2.0A if that helps you for any reason whatsoever.
Also according to that recap, Google is working on improving reconsideration requests so web spam analysts can provide additional feedback. Also, Google is close to getting IE 8 referring data back. It will still show mostly as not provided, it says, but will correctly show the visitor as coming from Google search.
Image via MYA (Twitter)