Matt Cutts has confirmed that Google have refreshed its Payday Loan algorithm, just weeks after the release of Payday Loan 2.0.
Cutts, Google’s head of search quality and spam, posted on Twitter at the end of last week that the new Payday Loan 3.0 was “rolling out now!”
Payday Loan 2.0 was launched last month around May 17-18th, and the original Payday Loan made its debut a year ago in June 2013. At the time of the launch, Matt Cutts said that the algorithm intended to target “very spammy sites”, usually involving industries where the link building and spam tactics are very extreme. It targets high value, highly spammed search results, and got its name because payday loan sites were targeted and affected by the algorithm.
The Payday Loan algorithm, which is unrelated to Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithms, has so far impacted on 0.3% of US search enquiries, and more so in European countries such as Turkey, where web spam is typically higher. The change hit 4% of Turkish search queries, and 0.2% of English search queries.
Matt Cutts explained that Payday 3.0 will go after different signals. The 2.0 version targeted spammy sites, whereas version 3.0 will target spammy queries, for example search terms such as “payday loans” “casinos” and “Viagra”. At the moment it is unclear what Matt Cutts means by the difference between spammy sites versus spammy queries, but webmasters expect him to put them in the picture soon with one of his traditional webmaster You Tube videos.
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