Google Farmer update goes international

Google said Monday that it has launched its so-called Farmer update, a new algorithm designed to weed out low-quality content.

With the international rollout, Web site owners will have a better idea of what Google's algorithm update really means for them.

As a refresher, Google launched its algorithm update a month ago. Some publishers did well. Others, like Mahalo, got whacked and announced layoffs.

Google said in a blog post that it has also incorporated user feedback:

Today we’ve rolled out this improvement globally to all English-language Google users, and we’ve also incorporated new user feedback signals to help people find better search results. In some high-confidence situations, we are beginning to incorporate data about the sites that users block into our algorithms. In addition, this change also goes deeper into the “long tail” of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before. The impact of these new signals is smaller in scope than the original change: about 2% of U.S. queries are affected by a reasonable amount, compared with almost 12% of U.S. queries for the original change.

Google claims its new algorithm is "very accurate at detecting site quality."

Here's a panel I moderated on the topic at a recent PaidContent conference.