On Tuesday, Google announced on the Google Japan Webmaster blog that they released a new algorithm that targets scraped content and pushes up original content.
Kenichi Suzuki was good enough to help translate this. I was confused, I thought Google announced a Panda update in Japan, but they did that back in July. Was this Panda #2 in Japan? Didn't sound exactly like it?
I am thinking this is that scraper update that hit late January 2011, right before the Panda update on February 24, 2011 in the US. I think Japan just got their scraper algorithm applied to Japanese languages. This update is serious for Japanese SEOs, where it impacts 5% of the Japanese search results.
It's a slow day and despite only 0.36% of our readers coming from Japan, I decided to cover this. So hopefully it helps 0.36% of you.
Forum discussion at Google+.
Update: Google told me this is not like the scraper algorithm from January 2011 and added they have nothing more to add about this algorithm update.
